Promo Products Relatively Strong on Consumer Recall: PPAI Study

Promotional products work hardest in the kitchen and at the office, and consumers—quite sensibly– favor food baskets and MP3 players over magnets and mouse pads.

Those are some of the findings from a two-part survey on the reception and relative impact of promotional products, released this week by the trade association that represents those vendors, the Promotional Products Association International.

Fielded in late 2009 in partnership with independent research company MarketTools, the panel-based study takes a two-part look at how promotional products perform in terms of customer acceptance and relative to other basic vehicles for brand promotion : namely TV, print and online ads.

According to the survey, 44% of the 1,005 participants reported receiving a promotional product of any kind in the previous two years, and 90.4% of that subset reported currently owning a promotional product of some kind. Of that latter group, 94% said they could recall the product, and 89% could recall the advertiser. Seventy-eight percent said they could recall the message on that product, while 76.2% could recall all three elements.

When it came to which promotional products they recalled, branded pens led the list (84%), followed by magnets (72%), calendars (67%) and key chains (54%).

But none of those figured high on the list of promotional products respondents most likely to create a favorable impression or induce a receiver to take action. Respondents were asked to rank promotional products on a scale of 1 to 5 for their ability to create a response. The indexed list showed respondents most receptive to food baskets (mean score 4.03 out of 5) and MP3 players (3.96) as promotions, followed by clocks or watches (3.74), digital picture frames (3.73) and luggage (3.69). Coffee mugs dipped below the 3-point mark to a mean of 2.89, and pens came in at 2.77, trailed by calendars, notebooks, water bottles, mouse pads, magnets, trophies and stickers, which earned a mean impact rating of 2.10 out of 5.

Of those who reported owning a promotional product, 91% said they had one on display in their kitchen, and 82% reported having two or more of such items there. Seventy-four percent of that group reported having at least one promotional item in their office or work space, and 59% said they had two or more items there. Of respondents who owned promotional products, 55% said they had one or more in their bedroom closet or storage space—and 41% had two to 11.

The second part of the PPAI survey focused on marketing reach and recall among 910 of the respondents who reported receiving a promotional product in the last year. Respondents were categorized according to the number of promotional products they had received in the previous year, and the number of TV, print and online ads they’d been exposed to in the previous two weeks.

According to the study, nearly half the panel of 910 subjects had received three or more promotional products in the prior year, compared to 56.2% who saw 11 or more TV ads in the two weeks before being questioned. Fifty percent had seen three or more print ads in that time and 53% had seen one or more online ads. (E-mail messaging was not included in this study.)

But in terms of recall, the PPAI study found, promotional products performed better than the other media. Among those who had seen two of more products in the year, 82.6% could recall the brand or company on the first product, 79.6% could recall the type of product, and 74.8% remembered the message. More than 69% said they could recall all three.

By comparison, brand recall for the first TV spot (among viewers who’d seen at least two in two weeks) was 67.6%, and just over 60% remembered both the brand and the message. For print ads, the first-ad recall rate for brands was 60.2% and the brand/message recall was 55%. Comparable metrics for online advertising were 31.3% brand recall and 28.7% brand/message recall.

Recall rates declined for the second instance in each medium, but PPAI’s research found that the brand/product/message recall rates for the second promotional item received in the year dropped only to 55.3%. By contrast, second-ad brand/message recall for print ads viewed in the previous two weeks fell to 51.2% and for online ads to 20.8%.
However, second-ad brand/message recall for TV spots over the two-week period remained relatively stable at 56.2%.