Whether you have a company or a business, branding is one of the most important entities. Branding helps to increase your business, thus enhancing your Return Over Investment (ROI). In this article, we shall look more into the details about branding and how to make the most of the festive season to increase your branding through corporate gifting.
To begin with, let’s first break up the title and understand the keywords – ‘branding’ and ‘corporate gifting’.
What is Branding?
Branding is basically a kind of advertisement for your company and its products. Through branding, you aim to establish your products and the company name in the minds of the customers or consumers. Branding, when used effectively, can make your company’s product synonymous with the name of an item, so that people have already set their minds to buy your company’s products instead of those of your competitors.
Benefits of Branding
Branding your company comes with a lot of advantages, some of them are:
1. It helps increase your company’s presence around your customers so that they are reinforced to purchase your products even when there are hundreds of similar products from your competitors.
2. It increases your sales beyond any doubt. If you employ proper marketing and branding strategies, your business will increase by leaps and bounds.
You can employ various techniques to improve your branding in the market like television advertisements, internet ads, newspaper clippings, gifts, etc. This brings us to our second keyword – ‘corporate gifting’.
What is Corporate Gifting?
Corporate gifting is one of the branding strategies which business owners employ to both increase their sales and the motivation of their employees, without actually giving any advertising messages. Some of the features of corporate-gifts are:
1. No obligation
The recipient (it could be your client or employee) has no obligation for the gift which you offer. In other words, you are offering them for free, as a symbol of appreciation or goodwill.
2. No advertising messages
A corporate gift should not obligate the recipient, not even to purchase your products. The only thing that your corporate gift should contain is your company’s logo. While you are offering the gift because you want the recipients to return the favour by purchasing your products or your employees by working more efficiently, you should never disclose it.
Also, note that the technique of corporate gifting is not immediately rewarding. It works, but very slowly. So never expect immediate results from corporate gifting.
Increasing your branding through corporate gifts
Here are a few ideas on increasing your branding through corporate gifts:
#1 Useful Commodities
Always consider gifting such items that are very useful for your client or employee on a day-to-day basis. For example, if you have young women as your customers, you may consider gifting them with a leather bag with the logo of your company. They will look at your company’s logo every single time they carry these bags. So, the next time they visit the shop, there are more chances of selecting your products. This gives you an edge over your competitors in the market.
#2 Personalize
Consider classifying your customers into various groups and give them customized gifts. For example, the group with young men who ride bikes would love to have a fine leather jacket. For others like middle-aged people, you may gift leather belts or bags with your company’s logo on them. For women leather bags might be very suitable. So, decide the gifts depending upon the customers. For doctors, it can be some writing pads or drug samples, etc.
The more personalised your gifts are, the more are the chances of increasing your branding.
#3 Unique
Your corporate gift should be unique from those offered by your competitors. This is because if all companies offer the same gift, all the companies will be on the same platform in the competition. To rise above the others, offer some unique gifts like leather vests, jackets, belts, etc.
#4 Valuable
The gifts you give should be of considerable price in the market. All the companies give pens, erasers, keychains, etc as their corporate gifts Items. So, in order to increase your sales, corporate gifts invite considerable amount of investment. More the price tag of your gift, more will it be appealing to your clients. In short, let the gifts of some value that the customers will appreciate like suedes for women who love riding. This definitely gives a cutting edge to your company in the market.
How does Corporate Gifting work in the brand building?
Corporate gifting is basically a psychological process called Reciprocity. According to it, humans are automatically programmed to return a favour if someone has gifted them something or even helped them sometime. It is as simple as the phrase, “You scratch my back, I will scratch yours.” The difference here is that you are not telling your clients that you want them to return the favour, you are leaving the other end open. Thus, you are indirectly compelling the other person (the client) to become your loyal customer.
A Festive season with may occasions like Christmas, the New Year, etc are perfect to gift your customers and employees with corporate gifts so that they won’t suspect you.
This was all that you needed to know about increasing your branding with corporate gifting. All the Best!!
