promotional products

The fanny pack has long been thought of as, at best, the quintessential accessory for the fashion-challenged. According to the New York Times, by the mid-1990s, the fanny pack became little more than “a punch line — something so excruciatingly dorky that even Weird Al Yankovic made fun of them.”

If you are a distributor of promotional products and specialty advertising items of any kind — whether you specialize in wearables like caps and outerwear, or even tech-related items like branded phone chargers or USB drives — you’re probably doing two things very, very right!

In the 2005 holiday film “The Family Stone”, Amy Stone is introduced holding her favorite fashion accessory. The moment is meant to tell us a bit more about her preferences and perhaps her personality. Played by Rachel McAdams, Amy appears briefly with a “National Public Radio” tote bag slung over her shoulder. This initial image hints more to come about Amy: the Stone Family's eldest daughter is educated and up-to-date on political issues.

At the beginning of 2015, the Advertising Specialty Institute circulated their annual “Impressions Study”, a market research report that provides an in-depth look at promotional products and the people that use them every day.

The report’s aim was to provide to suppliers and distributors of specialty advertising products better insight about what works. The study profiled everything from wearable items to writing instruments, and provided detail on many promotional product categories and how they contribute to overall marketing strategies.

During the last week of August 2015 Inc. magazine posted an article with a striking headline that pertains to a large segment of American enterprise. In “Why the B2B Market has Cooled Off,” columnist Diana ransom breaks down some of the latest economic numbers.

Running a business is no easy task. On any given day, you’ve got a hundred things to manage. And yet, in order to keep your business successful and growing, you always need to bring in new business, new sales and new orders.

Earlier this year, we posted about trade show giveaways and the need to strike the right note with audiences. For example, if you are a business exhibiting at a trade show some place where the sun shines year round, like Miami or Albuquerque, don’t pack the logoed ice scrapers and winter items for the show. That’s just common sense marketing.
 

Fairly or unfairly, insurance agents get typecast by the public and by the media, sometimes to hilarious effect. If you’ve ever seen the 1990s hit film “Groundhog Day” starring Bill Murray, you may remember the moment that Murray’s character (the snooty local news reporter named Phil Connors) bumps into an old high school classmate.
 

Sometimes people outside the business world have some of the best insight on business. One of those voices comes from the world-renowned fiction writer. Milan Kundera, the Czech author of Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being once said that “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”
 
These words call to mind a few ideas about some of the companies whose products have greatly changed the way we live and exist daily. Some easy first impressions include:

Perhaps you are one of those brave, industrious people who knows how to fix things. For decades, the “weekend warrior” has been an iconic role in the American way of life. There are men and women who simply love to solve everyday problems around the house and the yard on Saturdays and Sundays.