Marketing: Quality of Promotional Items

by NDK Creative Artist

Marketing is first and foremost a Perception-thing; it’s about image in the PR sense. “What image do you want to have?” is the same as saying “How do you want to be perceived?” The answer will determine the quality of your promotional items.

You can determine to control perception or you can leave it to chance. The techniques, tools and items of marketing are employed to bring about the control of perception. Depending on how they are used they can heighten perception of value — enhancing want — or they can degrade it.

The latter — leave-it-to-chance approach — usually makes for the product, entity or cause one is promoting being poorly perceived by potential buyers or participants. This results in no-to-low sales, no-to-low involvement. Image quality - the quality of graphic images - is immediately obvious to someone when they look at it. First impressions are vital lasting impressions and these impressions are formed in the first 1/25th of a second. So the quality of promotional items, from this perspective, is important.

Today’s technology permits many to work at home and create their own promotional items, and when you’re on a tight budget this is a fantastic asset — print (that bookmark) on demand! Oh, yeah! By all means make your promotional items at home. But only when:

1. You have quality graphics
2. You know what you’re doing in graphics from a technical viewpoint;
3. The printed end result will compete favorably with the quality of the works your work is competing with.

When you’re independently publishing your work Traditional Publishing Quality should be the benchmark you strive for and you should not, in most circumstances, settle for less than *the potential buyer’s perception* that your own promotional material is: “As good as traditionally published material.” It must therefore be as good as, or better than, those promotional items competitors use to entice and support sales. That’s how you level the playing field and compete on price and other factors. Your quality is as-good-as, or better than, your competition.

People always pay for quality and even if they don’t pay, they want to — and that’s creation of demand. Quality is made up of attention to all the necessary details at a professional level adequate to the purpose at hand. Quality is defined as: Degree or grade of excellence; the degree of perfection of a product or service; Professionals find out what degree of quality is necessary before they go further. The higher the quality the greater the perceived value of what is offered. Quality has everything to do with standard: the attainment of a definite level or degree of quality adequate to a specific purpose. Authors want their books to be perceived as something a reader would (a) desire to read; (b) be willing to pay for over and above every other offering of books available.

The attention and care you have lavished on researching, writing, proofing, editing and polishing your manuscript; creating, arranging, rehearsing and recording songs for an album, or; scripting, editing, proofing and producing a movie, deserves the best possible packaging to reflect the nature of that effort. The cover art, the print and image quality of other promotional items designed to attract attention to the work you want to sell are important…. No, they’re not important; they’re vital. If you didn’t lavish such care and attention upon the manuscript, then you should certainly stint on cover art and promotional item quality, so people know and pass on the item, keeping their pennies in their purse. Poor quality packaging is perceived as a sign of poor quality in content by the consumer. Quality packaging alone can even sell a book with blank pages (it has been done).

Aesthetics is important when it comes to promotional items. What do I mean by aesthetics? I mean the degree of appreciation perceived by whoever is looking. Good artwork is appreciated and remembered. Bad artwork is ignored and forgotten. Stint on aesthetics and you’ll lose more in lost sales (that-you-could-have-had), than if you had spent a few hundred or even a thousand dollars on good quality graphic design, and paid a professional level graphic artist/designer to make images you can use in many ways. Once you have high quality graphics one can adapt them on the home computer for different uses and applications, providing you have the appropriate copyright clearances.

When is a promotional item good?

What’s good in a promotional item? Good is when promotional items attract attention and create a favorable lasting impression in the mind of the consumer, and in the case of books: while interesting the potential book buyer in the contents (stimulating demand/desire to have/read). Good is when they pick up yours instead of the thousand others on offer in your niche. Spend some time standing in the aisles at a bookstore and notice what kind of books people pick out of a given genre. They’re making that choice based on the quality of the item and its ability to communicate to them — when they picked that book off the shelf it did its first job: it attracted attention.

A More Fundamental Principle

There is a principle in marketing that is more basic and more important and we should take it into account, and that is this: outflow (the placement of promotional items such as ads, fliers, and other promotional items.) is far more important than inflow (receiving cash, sales, etc.). The fact of the matter is, if you don’t outflow - place promotional items at all - then no inflow will occur. You have to let people know you exist, what you have that they may be interested in, where to get it and how much. This is more fundamental than having quality promotional items. You always want to have good/high quality promotional items but, they must be adequate to the purpose at hand. If the quality of the (printed) item is going to be less, then the quality of the message on it and the usage of the item to communicate that message must be commensurately more effective if it is to fulfill it’s function. In a circumstance where you have to use cheaper — lower quality — items, up the quantity you use considerably. When using more expensive — higher quality items — the quantity can come down, because the item should be more effective. So, if you’re caught short and need to make some emergency items, do it. Even ineffective promotion is better than no promotion at all and the first thing to do is let many people know you exist.

Bookmark Quality and the Purpose of Promotional Items

In October of 2002 there were discussions on the Print-On-Demand list at Yahoo [Print-On-Demand@yahoogroups.com] about the quality of promotional items and specifically bookmarks. So let’s take a look at that particular promotional item. What is a desirable level of quality for a bookmark? Well, first off a bookmark fulfills a couple of functions and it must do them well. A bookmark must:

1. Protect the book for as long as possible from user page degradation (in other words, having a bookmark for a book raises - in the customer’s mind - the perceived value of the book above books that do not have “bookmark included”). You’re helping the reader care for your book when you give the reader a bookmark. That’s a service point and that is appreciated.

2. The longer the bookmark lasts the longer it will be useful.

3. The more useful it is, the more often it will be used. Perhaps even to bookmark the books of other authors. So while they’re reading another author’s books they’re seeing your promotional message.

4. The more often it is used - even to mark other books - the more often it is seen and can be used to remind the reader of your existence, your book and other items (your website perhaps).

Now, our functional practical bookmark has become a promotional item and not just a functional item - it’s multitasking! How effective it will be, will depend on how well written the copy and design is.

A Skill Every Writer Should Master

All writers should know how to write effective copy and here’s a great site with some awesome articles on copywriting, a vastly different but extremely important skill for writers to master than the writing of fiction/non-fiction. The craft of copywriting is even more important to an author because you must promote your own work, whether you’re traditionally published or independently published. Knowing the craft of copywriting will also give you more control over how you are promoted by others, when you start making the larger deals and end up in Publisher’s Lunch.

Would you rather have a bookmark that retains its usefulness for months (or years) or one that disintegrates quickly? Put it another way: Are you building a writing career or writing one book?

The Test of a Promotional Item

One should never care about what people say about promotional items so much as what they do when they see them. What they do determines the effectiveness of the promotional item. The sum total of the quality (copy [text], title, cover art, etc.) is what forms a perception of that particular author and their product. So what perception/effect do you wish to form in the mind of the consumer? One that sells the work, or one that doesn’t? The choice you make here results in the quality of promotional item you will have. Studies I have read have (and I regret I cannot cite them) determined that a substantial upgrade of quality can increase income revenues by as much as 500%! The result of marketing is generally accepted as income greater than expenditure (depending on type and purpose of campaign). Spend $100 and you should expect a subsequent return of $500 is a good rule of thumb. Bear in mind that should that higher return not occur that it may not be the quality of the graphics or promotional items that is in question - there are a lot of other factors all of which one should raise to a similar level of quality. For the purpose of this article we assume all other factors approach the necessary degree of quality.

In Conclusion

Promotional items are your first line of approach in attracting attention and delivering a service or product. Promotional items enable you to reach more than one person in a given instant. They have to be good for the competition for attention is stiff. Their purpose is to attract and direct potential buyer attention, while stimulating desire to the point of action. Remember AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)? to that add Satisfaction - for satisfaction is what will build a loyal readership, and that’s your market, the readers you have created for your work. Readers are looking for a Satisfying Reader Experience, promotional items start them down that road, and the expense to get one reader, one listener, one watcher is always more than the expense to turn the first time reader into a loyal reader, a first time listener into Satisfied Readers will return for more satisfying reading experiences. They become Loyal Readers.

It’s having Loyal Readers that will ultimately craft a viable career, if that’s what you desire. The quality of promotional items is part of the initial expense that starts them down the road to having your books on their shelf. Give promotional items the consideration they’re due, and assign them an appropriate value when you wish to be successful. High quality graphics, high quality printing and packaging create the perception that results in sales. A book is judged by the quality of its cover, first and foremost, and also by the quality of the promotional items that support it.

Editor’s Note: this article first appeared on WordThunder in 2002 and has been updated by NDK Creative Artist for the Free Articulator.

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