Stumbling Upon Promotional Products in the World #10
· Found: Antique store in Georgia
· Item: Pencils
· Promoted Brand: Little Debbie
Can you believe it’s the end of 2019? Your A-Z Swagman has been sharing ideas for using promotional products in your branding campaigns for about three and a half years now! I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you in making the promo division of AZOR such a success (and still the fastest growing part of A-Z Office Resource!)
I just went back through the previous nine Stumbling entries because I’ve been under the impression that a majority of the promo products were found in antique or thrift stores. Surprizingly, your A-Z Swagman has only introduced three such entries (OK, four now). Yes, there are more in my collection, but I’ll try to maintain the balance.
OK, back to the subject of this entry. These pencils were found in an antique store booth bundled in fours. The booth owner had wrapped them in a thin tape, which damaged some of the pencils as you can see. Otherwise, what do we notice about the decoration? Notice that there is nothing except the Little Debbie logo imprinted on the pencils. This flies in the face of standard advice to add a call-to-action on your advertising. Now, Little Debbie can get away with this because they are EVERYWHERE! Seriously, go to any grocery or convienience store and you’ll find them. They are a well-established brand and are just reinforcing their brand – probably they just had these created for a corporate sales meeting event, or for their representatives to use when representing their products.
For more local or regional brands, you may want to include your call-to-action as your phone number, website, physical address, hashtag, or any of a range of other ideas. A promotional product’s imprint area is the physicsal space available for decoration. Your A-Z Swagman and the rest of the AZOR Promotional Products Division will always help in choosing the best product for your brand’s message.
Note the pencil choices below. The round pencil has an imprint of 4.5-inches up the length, and 0.8125-inch around. This is plenty of space for your message (but do remember that as the pencil is sharpened, you’ll loose some of it!) Additionally, remember that viewing an image around the barrel may present some challenges.
An alternative, especially for construction-related businesses, might be the carpenter’s pencil shown here. Over five inches by almost a half an inch, and FLAT imprint area means your entire brand and message are seen in one viewing.
Of course, one style of pencil will not give you as large an imprint area: Golf Pencils are much shorter of course – and you’ll have to decide if you trust the recipients with an eraser or not.
And finally, if your interested in size and ensuring sharpening the pencil won’t detract from your message, how about one that won’t fit into a pencil sharpener!? (bet you thougth I was going to suggest a mechanical pencil, right? – well, that is another option, but this is more fun!) How about a 16-inch pencil with a 9-inch x 0.75-inch imprint area!!
BTW, just because the Little Debbie logo takes up only about 2.25 x 0.75-inches, it doesn't mean that’s the full imprint area available. Also, the subject of this blog entry does not constitute an endorsement of the oh-so addictive taste of certain oatmeal cream pies!!
As we move into the next decade, please reach out to your A-Z Swagman for the best promotional product tools for your brand! Email swagman@azorinc.com or contact your local A-Z Representative.
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Any products found were obtained legally and photos are of the actual item. Current available items mentioned are subject to availability and prices or specials mentioned in the entry may not be current. Opinions and assumptions of the products shown are exactly that -- educated opinions and assumptions based on years of experience in the graphics and marketing industry, as well as some light online research. Any errors are regrettable and will be corrected as necessary. No offense is intended by any conclusions drawn by your A-Z Swagman. Any feedback from the marketing firms that produced these promotional products will be incorporated into a follow-up blog entry!