Promotional Products Beat Out Mainstream Media as Top Advertising Choice

A 2009 study of the advertising purchasing habits of end buyers reveals that promotional products are preferred as their top advertising choice over mainstream media including television, newspaper and the Internet. The study surveyed more than 1,000 buyers and was conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University and Glenrich Business Studies for the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) .

Participants were asked to evaluate promotional products, television, direct mail, newspapers, consumer magazines, trade publications, Internet and social media with regard to eight attributes associated with marketers’ needs. Promotional products ranked first for five of the eight attributes:

*Ability to achieve long-term memorability at the cost of paying for only a single exposure
*Flexibility to fit the cost of the medium to available budget
*Ability to bond audience to advertiser so as to promote repeat business
*Audience friendly (i.e., not as likely to offend or be regarded as a nuisance)
*Ability to generate traffic (e.g., stores, tradeshows, events)

Areas where other advertising mediums outranked promotional products:

*Best cost-per-thousand (CPM) to reach selective or niche audiences
*Ability to personalize messages or recipients’ names
*Best cost-per-thousand (CPM) to reach mass audiences

Additionally, participants were shown a list of attributes commonly associated with promotional products and asked to evaluate how important each attribute was to their marketing needs. Of the 11 listed, three attributes achieved the highest combined scores of ‘important’ or ‘very important’:

*Ability to reach target audiences efficiently (no budget waste on non-prospects)
*Flexibility to fit budget
*Ability to promote customer/audience loyalty/repeat business

Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they use promotional products, with 30 percent choosing them ‘always’ or ‘often’. Overall, 78 percent of survey participants believe that promotional products are ‘somewhat effective’ or ‘very effective’.

Age demographics seem to show that the younger one is, the more effective they find promotional products to be: 25.5 percent of the 18-34 age group compared to 13.9 percent of those over 50 found them to be ‘very effective’, whereas just 9.8 percent of 18-34 year olds compared to 20.4 percent of those over 50 found them ‘not very effective’.

— Nielsen Business Media