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APRIL 2017
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INNOVATE
L
ast year, PPAI launched its
Get In Touch! campaign,
a five-year, multimillion-
dollar, industry-wide initiative
encouraging advertising
buyers to recognize the power
of promotional products and
to allocate a larger share of
their marketing dollars to the
promotional products industry.
How do we, as practitioners,
fulfill that mission? Through our
daily work in the promotional
products industry, have we
lost touch with how crucial
our medium is for conveying
emotion? How do we ensure
we build campaigns that “get
in touch”?
At the recent skucon
conference (an annual
educational experience for
industry entrepreneurs held
concurrent with the The PPAI
Expo in Las Vegas), distributor
and supplier attendees became
our use case for the power of
promotional products and
the Get In Touch! initiative.
Our medium, when treated
as a vehicle for conveying
emotion, becomes much more
than products, and an entire
promotional campaign can fulfill
a passionate purpose.
Many of us have had it wrong
for years. We’re not in the
promotional marketing business
at all; we’re in the
emotional
marketing business.
As attendees (distributors and
suppliers) received their bags of
promotional products at skucon,
we heard:
“Love!”
“Super cool!”
“Perfection.”
“On point.”
“Stylish.”
“Swag worth stealing!”
Starbucks’s Howard Schultz
wrote a stunning admission in
his autobiographical memoir,
Onward: How Starbucks Fought
For Its Life Without Losing Its
Soul.
He said the real value
of their brand wasn’t coffee:
“Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional
... but
emotional connection
is our true value proposition.”
Inside The
Business Of
Emotional
Marketing
by
Bobby Lehew, CAS
Inspired To Get In Touch