When thinking of advertising specialties, promotional items, and corporate gifts, many people immediately understand that to mean pens and coffee mugs with a company logo on them. While these items are tremendously common, there are many other items that fall under this broad classification, thousands in fact.

Advertising specialties have evolved to include just about any item available in the market place, from pens and mugs, to luxury brand name items, wearable and eatables items at any price point. You can find brand names such as Tommy Hilfiger, Omaha Steaks, Movado and many other well-known brands in this arena.

Promotional marketing items can be any item that can be etched, embroidered, silk-screened, printed on or somehow emblazoned with company logo and marketing/positioning message or employed in a broader marketing campaign to speak to specific products or services a company or organization is marketing.

The competition to sell these items is stiff. Not only are companies competing with other marketing specialty companies locally, but also the Internet has made competition ubiquitous.

Facing this broad, far reaching competition, the market place is increasingly becoming commoditized. The downward pressure on price makes it increasingly difficult to make a reasonable profit. If the determining factor on whether you make a sale is price alone, you will be working harder to make the smallest possible margin. In the end, is this a business model that makes sense? I suggest it is not.

In order to find a strategy to market goods and services in this market environment that will allow you to remain profitable, it is critical to find a way to differentiate yourself from your competition and provide additional value added to your service that your customer can understand and be willing to pay for. This will help you maintain a reasonable profit margin and help insulate you from your competition and the commoditization of the marketplace.

If you are banking on “we give excellent service” as your unique selling/value proposition then you will be out of business quickly. This proposition is the most basic, and one, which is present in the claims of every company out there.

The big players in this space, your competition, have infrastructure and resources that allow incredible turn around times, buying power and volume of sales often afford them special pricing. That skews the playing field and makes it really tough to compete.

What can the small company do?

An alternate strategy to trying to compete on price/service alone is to really have a clearer understanding the brand of your customer. To get this vantage point, you must research what your customer or prospect does, who their customers are, what drives them philosophically, what is there unique selling proposition and how is it manifested in there marketing materials and advertising.

One must research the company extensively. Look at their web site, request literature from the company, read their ads and brochures, and observe the tone, tenor and style of their communication. The object of this exercise to get a feel for the company and the way they see the world, the way they communicate and to whom they are communicating.

This is a strategy to position you as “THE” expert in promotional marketing that has done the homework, that is familiar with the brand and advertising of the customer and their products! Become a defacto member of their marketing team! Arm yourself with a marketing presentation that is on target, thoughtful, high impact and appropriate to the existing marketing and advertising.

Understanding something as basic as the company colors will allow you to create samples and make suggestions that immediately demonstrate you know their business. The last thing you would want to do is make a presentation of an item to find out the item is not available with the company color scheme. Similarly, if the company is marketing high-ticket goods and services to CEO’s, you will want to pitch items with a high perceived value. Familiarity with your customers marketing efforts and advertising will allow you make suggestions on items that somehow reinforce or play well with those messages.

Armed with this knowledge, you can make the inroads to getting the attention of your prospect and delivering the value they will pay for.

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