John Spain calls for thinking time

In September I always go the National Venue Show at the NEC in Birmingham. As many of you will know, it runs alongside Reed's National Incentive Show and the National Direct Marketing Show.

There are natural connections between the three exhibitions and a visit should prove beneficial for anyone involved in marketing a company's products.

This is only the second issue of the new Promotional Merchandise newsletter but in all the conversations I've had with new contacts in the promotions industry, one word seems to crop up on a very regular basis.

That word is 'think'.

As I suggested last month in the feature I wrote in which I shared my impressions of the industry, most people I've spoken to are agreed that things would be made a whole lot simpler if clients really thought through what they wanted to achieve.

I know that we live at a hundred miles an hour nowadays and that our hectic work schedules make it hard for us to pinch a quiet few minutes just to sit and do nothing except put a few ideas together.

However, with so many companies in every sector desperate to get business it will be the ones who have come up with the all-important hook that will get the lion's share.

Now, the reason I mentioned those exhibitions at the beginning of this piece is because they are shows which are for marketers, the people who visit are marketers and so are the people who exhibit.

Those exhibitions began the day after England won the Ashes at the Oval. I'm sure you can all remember the exuberance shared by most people, cricket fans and those who just like to see a British team doing well.

And yet, not one stand at the NEC had anything to do with cricket on it. No-one had had the simple idea of going to a shop and buying a cheap cricket bat and a couple of tennis balls and using them as some sort of gimmick to attract people onto the stand. On the day after England won the Ashes it would have been a certain way of attracting interest.

I am not a marketer which means that if I had the idea then it couldn't have been that difficult to come up with!

So, next time you are looking at sending out some kind of promotional gift to back up a sales or publicity campaign, why not take a few minutes to simply think things through? Think carefully about what you are trying to achieve and what the best way of doing this would be. What would the promotional item say about you, your company and, most importantly, the service you are offering? What does it say about how you see your potential clients? How impressed would they be that you had come up with something so simple, and yet so perfectly suited to the task. They'd be so impressed they'd be on the phone to you straight away.

By the time you receive the next issue of Promotional Merchandise the festive season will be all over for another year. We at Promotional Merchandise hope you have a peaceful and joyful Christmas and that you return in 2006 refreshed and ready for a successful and profitable New Year.

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