When Perugina wanted an incentive to capture Mother’s Day gift buyers last year, an off-the-shelf premium was not in the cards. The chocolatier packed its candies into terra cotta flower pots with hand-painted floral designs, planting its name and logo onto the containers’ bases. Perugina reinforced an image as a premium confectioner. Moms had to love it.
Are premium offers getting more creative? Frankly, yes.
Premiums are pulling double duty as marketers demand promotions with brand-enhancing, as well as sales-building, characteristics. Moreover, customized premiums are easier to source within budget constraints, providing you can find that bendable toy or one-of-a-kind shoulder bag in a distribution network that resembles a map of the New York City subway system.
Premium offers don’t have to be customized to be great, but made-to-order premiums help products stand out.
“Companies want identity and individuality in their premiums. They are into one-upmanship and the consumer is extremely sophisticated,” says Mary Anne Fontana, president of MAF Marketing, a Morganville, NJ, premium rep and importer.
“Twenty years ago, only the big guys could play here. Today minimum quantities are lower because the world is shrinking and equipment is more sophisticated. We fill 2,000-piece orders,” adds Fontana, a former Wearever Cookware director of marketing.
MAF sourced Perugina’s premium from a Far East supplier which custom-made the moldings and packed a 30,000 piece order.
STICKY FINGERS Take an eight-inch strip of metal and bend it into a fun shape and what do you have? Cupholders for corporate accounts who beat quota? Nope. You have a solution to a consumer marketing problem that faced Aurora Foods.
The Columbus, OH-based company needed to carve separate identities for its two pancake syrups, Log Cabin and Mrs. Butterworth’s, and it hatched two premium promotions to get the job done.
Think of Mrs B. as a fun-loving, nurturing soul with a soft spot for kids. Starting this month, Aurora offers consumers a pancake mold shaped like the sculptured bottle for proof and $2.75. Talk about molding consumer perceptions.
Log Cabin is a more adult-skewed brand that restores family traditions, and is “more mapley”, says Kim McGough, senior account manger at the QLM agency in Princeton, NJ, which handles the programs for both brands.
Aurora forged an alliance with the National Parks Foundation to restore a log cabin a year for the next four years. To create an even more indelible link with its brand heritage, Aurora redid the syrup brand’s bottle in the shape of a cabin. An FSI announced the partnership in June. Next month it kicks off an SL0 offer of a log cabin ornament, with part of the proceeds donated to the NPF’s 1999 cabin restoration project in the Great Smoky Mountains.
“The ornament leverages the brand equity of Log Cabin, the NPF partnership, the new cabin shaped bottle,” says McGough, and an ad campaign by Ogilvy and Mather, Chicago. It carries the tagline ‘In the heart of every home there is a little log cabin.'”
QLM sourced the items from Stolz Mead Global, Columbus, OH, who went global to get them.
Premium offers don’t have to be on steroids, with custom features, to help out the brand. Kids’ brands through affinity efforts are targeting kids with offers of brand name electronics. Youngsters in focus groups invariably point to products from vendors like Sony and Yes!, says Regis Marketing ceo Regis Welsh.
“These are exciting brands that drive response,” says Welsh, at the Milwaukee distributor.
Does a Panasonic disc player offer help position sea-salted UFO Bites with kids in the snack arena? Sure, if you want a far-out, cool image. Plus, you can meet eyes with the senior brand manager at the quarterly sales review.
OBJECTIVE MARKETING Premiums as strategic loyalty builders strutted their stuff this year in catalog programs employed by industries as far-flung as packaged goods giants and banks. But let’s face it, apart from QSRs, which have become quasi-toy stores, brands aren’t falling over themselves to use premium promotions. Three-quarters of companies say they don’t use premiums, according to the Incentive Federation’s 1997 study.
Yet corporations like to advertise themselves with products. Just witness the thriving promotional products industry. It may be a short leap from wanting an employee to carry your name around on a sweatshirt to wanting a consumer to carry your brand’s name around in the form of a branded-yet-cool premium.
If brands are reacquainting themselves with the full promotional arsenal, marketers can’t continue to overlook a workhorse like premiums.
They are not likely to if distributors have their say.
Companies have already forced distributors to produce turn-key solutions for internal and business-to-business promotion products programs, asking for services from program creation and implementation to ROI measurement and database support. One in five distributors offer “strategic marketing consultations” according to the industry’s The Counselor magazine.
With below-the-line disciplines all the rage among brand managers, distributors are systematically moving into the brand strategy business.
Take Boise Marketing Services, the fifth-largest ad specialties distributor with 1997 sales of $98.7 million. Ten years ago Boise was happy to sell logoed toy trucks to executives at, say, The Filibrator Co., who could use them to hold down papers on their desks. Mobil uses them today in its five-years-running Christmas Mobile Holiday Truck Sales promo. Customers this year get a toy flatbed truck for $19 and up.
“We provide the entire promotion from soup to nuts. POS, dealer sell-in, product liability, returns, billing. Our clients are looking for more involved participation from us,” says Boise sales and marketing chief John Garrity.
Consolidation of marketing services companies and premium houses surged along this year. Deals included Ha-Lo, Inc.’s buy of Chicago-based promo agency Upshot and Aspen Marketing Group’s grab of Phone-works, the Ft. Lauderdale interactive marketing pioneer.
Ha-Lo isn’t a complete stranger to consumer promotions. It has had a long-running relationship with Montgomery Ward to manage all of its premium products programs.
The Niles, IL, distributor produced the Greatest Hits of the Chicago Bull CDs for MW’s in 1996. It became Chicago’s top selling CD.
Buying Upshot “enhances our ability to bring leading-edge brand promotion marketing and dynamic creative ideas to our clients,” says Ha- Lo president and ceo Lou Weisbach.
Fine. Ha-Lo and Upshot sharing clients and services has got to help build the business, but will it result in promotions with spanking-great premiums for new Ha-Lo clients like Anheuser-Busch and Procter & Gamble cosmetics?
If the creatives at Upshot run out of ideas, they can always spend a lunch hour browsing the warehouse shelves over in Niles.
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