Using promotional umbrellas to market your brand

Promotional umbrellas are one of the most effective ways to market your brand.

Promotional umbrellas and your brand

Whether you are a small family business or a multinational company, your reputation is important to you. Whilst large companies can afford to have equally large marketing and advertising budgets, the majority of businesses need to rely on the clever use of marketing to promote themselves, their brand and their values. Promotional umbrellas have been used by companies of all sizes to raise their profile. The colour and printing options, together with the way promotional umbrellas are used make them an excellent choice for businesses in all sectors.

How to use promotional umbrellas

Even top quality promotional umbrellas may not be as expensive as you think, and can be ordered in small quantities as well as large. This means that you can tailor the message on your umbrella to a particular event, anniversary or product. In addition, you can choose handles, umbrella ties and covers that tie in with your brand colours, helping to identify your company with the umbrella. There are several ways you can use promotional umbrellas to raise brand awareness:

• Distribute to staff & directors
  
• Sell for charity fundraising
  
• Give as corporate gifts to clients
  
• Give as corporate gifts to suppliers
  
• In reception, for visitors and guests to use
  
• Gifts for advisers – accountants, solicitors etc.
  
• Gifts at exhibitions, conferences and corporate events

One of the very real brand benefits of promotional umbrellas is that they are widely used. Once people have a quality umbrella, it is used for both business and leisure, meaning that your brand message reaches a far wider audience than you may think. If you plan carefully and use unusual, witty or very creative images and text, promotional umbrellas will generate interest wherever they are seen.

Personalised lanyards – the power of advertising

Personalised lanyards can be used for advertising. But just how much of an impact does advertising have?

Advertising is a part of everyday life, and we are used to seeing television commercials, flyers and wheel covers to name but a few forms of the medium. Have we become immune to advertising, or does it still have the power to influence us?

In 1985, the makers of Coca-Cola announced that, since Americans seemed to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, Coca-Cola would be discontinued in favour of a sweeter drink, New Coke. The uproar that followed was unbelievable. All three major television networks had extensive coverage on prime-time news. It made the front page of newspapers across the country. People rushed out to buy up the remaining Coca-Cola, often at inflated prices. It became a collector’s item.

Coca-Cola picked up an additional three percentage points of the soft drink market, which translated into $3-billion dollars in additional sales. Whether the coke people were being naïve or clever, the publicity they received without having to pay for newspaper ads, wheel covers or any other form of advertising was priceless.

We know that a great deal of advertising is used to launch a new product, but advertising is just as important to an established business. When Philip K. Wrigley, heir to the largest chewing gum company in the world, was asked during a flight why he still spent so much on advertising, he replied, "For the same reason the pilot of this airplane keeps the engines running when we're already 29,000 feet up." Keeping the product in the public eye using hoardings, lanyards or radio ads, means that the public keeps buying it.

Outdoor advertising is a massive field of opportunity. Much of it works on a subliminal level – we walk past sandwich boards, posters or people wearing personalised lanyards on a daily basis and claim that we don’t even see them, but you can bet that we will recall the message the next time we walk into a shop or place an order online.

Specialty advertising is even more diverse, including matchbooks, key chains, paper weights, coasters, wheel covers, book marks, tie tacks, pins, lighters, cigars, point-of-sale displays, anything you can put a logo or message on, including clothing. The chances are that right now we’re wearing somebody's advertising, and if others like the look of those trousers, that shirt or those shoes, they're one step closer to buying one for themselves.

Nowadays product placement and television sponsorship is the big thing in advertising. It doesn’t seem particularly odd to us that the number one soap opera is sponsored by the number one chocolate-seller in the UK. We are used to the electronic signage flashing around the edges of our football matches.

The answer is that however immune we may think we are, the need and desire to buy and sell are integral parts of human life and advertising is the most effective way of doing this.