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Ide dentit ntity y Edge

April 2020

Professional Inspiration for Promotional Products End Users/Buyers

Special Issue

The Covid-19 Pandemic How its Affecting the Promotional Product Industry

Do Great Things with Your Brand to Fight Covid-19 Now and in the Fall Summer & Fall Promotions Will Explode Your Brand Can Prosper Helping the Cause

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.PROMO

Special Issue

Covid-19 Upsets Our World But Promo is There to Help in BeneďŹ cial Ways

16 Do Great Things with Your Logo--Fight Covid-19 20 Get Ready for a Mega Strong Comeback 26 Ready Your Return to Branding Your Company 30 Hand Sanitizer Branding BOOMS 34 Industry Suppliers Change & Make Needed Goods 56 Living with Pandemics in the Future 54 Promotions Will Serve a Higher Purpose 66 Summer & Fall Promotions Plan NOW!

Do Great Things with Your B Russell Stover did a commercial with virtual hugs. Virgin Media stated, “Stay Home, Stay Safe, Stay Connected” program. Land Rover teamed up with the British Red Cross with a response to Covid-19. Their branding is trendy and educates. That’s what you can do promotionally as well.

Whether we want to admit it or not, Covid-19 will impact just about everything we’ll do in the future. That means you’ll have to alter your marketing strategies to evolve in these uncertain times moving forward. Consumer behaviors and attitudes have and are rapidly changing.

During Covid-19 we adapted--although unhappily--to working, shopping, exercising, learning at home and many other things. Looking ahead, the best companies will prepare now with plans on how they’ll meet the needs of consumers WHERE THEY ARE AT when the recovery period returns.

Social distancing will become a new norm and the role of the Promotional Products Buyer will change. What will that role be like?

Right now the role of the Promotional Products Buyer may now seem fuzzy.

However, that’s quite the opposite as this is a great opportunity to pick up on consumer behaviors so you can engage them in new ways.

These changing times dictate that to survive the negative sentiment and economic slowdown you should consider using promotional products to emulate resilience, innovation, agility and empathy. For example, running nurse “Thank you” programs with teddy bears. They need all the emotional support they can get right now.

You can think small or big if your budget allows.

We envision as well that sending individual gifts to your consumers at home will become a defacto standard. That means your promotional programs in the future will require you sending promotional products to your client’s home. In our industry usually there are split shipment charges, a minimal addition in most cases to the cost of the order.

We also know that people will be spending more time at home...and on their mobile devices as a result of Covid-19. You can connect with your client’s through no/low cost social media programs where they will get your branded items. Then in some cases your promotional products will be sent to the client’s dwelling/office. This will become more mainstream. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest are perfect avenues for this because they can drive the promotion very inexpensively on the media side.

Our advice--from your Promotional Products Distributor--is to focus on your

customer experience n ever. When people wo provide them with com ...thoughtful promotio they will see and feel a ment of your company

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Use your brand to educate the public: Let Hope Bloom.

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Get Ready for a Mega-S Social distancing can lead to stress, boredom, anxiety, and a sense of loneliness.

This makes it crucial to identify individual consumer needs and address them now...Especially since we have been afflicted with the Corona virus.

For example, with schools and offices closed, it becomes difficult for parents to work from home and engage their kids. So Audible, an audio book service by Amazon, is now offering free streaming of stories to entertain, teach, and engage children while schools remain shut.

During this unprecedented time, as consumers' buying behaviors and media consumption change, it's so important for marketers to understand these emerging patterns – as well as to anticipate consumer needs. Real-time insights and technology that anticipate consumer interests and needs are essential for marketers and brands to create meaningful, supportive engagement with consumers. Brands have an opportunity to deliver real-time assurance, a feeling of connection.

All marketing efforts must now be re-framed through the lens of COVID-19 and its broader business impact...many products can still play a role in this new reality. Focus on increased personalized connectivity like individually logoing products.

Be present in the Digital World! As people stay at home, time spent on their mobile

devices, and on-line platforms is already on the rise. They are spending more time on streaming platforms for entertainment, social media for connecting with the outside world, e-commerce portals for shopping, and so on. This is a perfect place to promote your products using promo hard goods because you have a captive audience.

Although COVID-19 has disrupted marketing and advertising initiatives, we can expect marketers to keep their plans fluid and tweak their ad-spends to reach customers where they are using promotional products.

That said, brands must reallocate budgets to ad campaigns accordingly, and reach consumers where they are most active – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. We anticipate this number will only increase as people stay indoors and social media advertising becomes a primary focus for more retail branded items.

Focus on customer experience more than ever...because in worrying time likes these, brands must focus on instilling confidence in customers, by providing them with the means to cope with the situation, furnishing the right information, and going beyond to help customers. Being empathetic and prioritizing customer experience will help your brand stand out and help you build a loyal customer base. And the use of promo products is a wonderful way to do just that.

Promote thyself...

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Strong Comeback

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f that we see a huge resuromotional products marlogoed gifts you use to omers your Brand Ambasly fit the reopening of our pandemic ceases. Those products you’ve been omote your brand will gger meaning if they are nting or killing the dis-

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Anticipate Customer Needs

Ready Your Return to Brandin For all of us April 2020 will be one month we won’t want to remember fondly. But enough gloom and doom! The world isn’t ending because of Covid-19 and neither is your job to brand your company. The world will return to normal, but we all know it will never be the same.

With that in mind, let’s focus on some positive ideas that will kick start your branding.

We’re heard from just a few of your fellow Buyers they might feel defining Summer and Fall promotions now is a little premature. They feel waiting to see when the pandemic breaks is good thinking. But sitting around waiting isn’t the answer.

Its really not. You’ve got to start planning now. When the pandemic breaks people will have been so couped up in their residences that they will explode to get outside and resume a normal lifestyle.

This is a great time to fire up your promotional planning and get your ducks in a row for Summer and Fall; unfortunately you’ll be making up for lost time. The good news is you’re most likely home with a clearer head which provides a time to pause and rethink the rest of 2020 andThe best you can do now is to look inside and try to reorganize your company’s beyond.

branding strategies and help your customers in the best way you can, addressing what brands you should prioritize in light of the coronavirus crisis and the likelihood that a pandemic like this will return in the future.

This is going to require figuring out new ways to do business. A lot of Buyers are thinking about shifting to an online model for their promotional programs with their customers. What does that mean? It means somewhere in the near future transitioning to promoting/branding online with promotional products in addition to group events like charity walks will be the norm.

This could--and will be--a dramatic shift for many businesses, but it becomes even more complex in light of social distancing, which is keeping customers at home and driving down demand. Its the branding professionals job to keep customers and drive up demand.

While things will return to normal for the most part there should be a “Plan B” for branding using promotional products. Promotional products will still provide a consistent strategy for branding but Buyers will never want to witness such a complete shutdown as they did with the Coronavirus.

Some Buyers and Branding professionals

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parts of the business that are uring the crisis will help you ons that can keep your busiuntil demand for your offeror when this happens again.

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hings that we’ve been thinking . . is that you don’t want to sitive at a time like this. This is and you don’t want to seem aking advantage of a situation expectations. We recomt brand managers review their messaging to ensure that it’s en the current crisis..and one s sure to happen again.

d you need to be conscious of ies and communication to are to maintain positive relath clients. post-pandemic:

While the end of the virus is not yet on the horizon, there are still many proactive measures that businesses can take to help themselves bounce back strongly and quickly. This will set the ground work for the future, perhaps as soon as Fall of 2020, this pandemic will return.

A lot of it is just like, “OK, let’s figure out our game plan.” Just think about what the next three, six, nine months are going to look like with this new landscape and these new challenges.

“There’s no way to make business when there is no demand but we can look ahead and envision a suppressed demand down the road, and how not to let our business crash to a standstill. Developing the proper branding theory will keep sales going during these tough times. Using promotional products will always endear your clients to advertise and endorse your products.

Because people are wanting to make up for what they didn’t do when they were at home you can expect a fairly quick return in a couple of months. accounting for that gradual return to normal levels of demand will also help your agency and your clients allocate resources appropriately.

Update Your Branding

Talk Yourself Up

Review Your Website

Optimize Everything

Research the Competition

Derive Options for Promo Products

Dive Into the Data

Your Packaging

Should Be As Impressive As What’s In It.

Hand Sanitizer Branding Sweeps the Promotional Products Industry Walgreens, CVS, and your local grocery store aren’t the only places millions of bottles of hand sanitizer were sold...the promotional products industry has sold millions too, but with the client’s logo on them. From Budweiser to Tito’s Vodka, Chase Bank and thousands of other Buyers like yourself all across the country, hand sanitizer was the go-to promo product during the pandemic. In fact Tito’s is making their own batch, some 24 tons of it, and giving it away.

And they couldn’t have picked a better time or cause to use branding to support a life or death pandemic.

The Promotional Products Industry Sold Millions of Branded Hand Sanitizers in a Single Month.

It just shows you how powerful promotional products are...even in this pandemic companies are using logoed products to do something socially responsible, help a life or death cause and more...

There were more hand sanitizers sold in six weeks of 2020 than in all of last year.

Industry Suppliers Change Manufa Hanes, one of the largest wearables manufacturers in the promotional products industry, started retooling their plants to make H95 Masks recently. With huge capacity, Hanes could rival 3M in the mask making business.

Don Charney, past CEO of American Apparel oers his Apparel Workforce for Masks, Medical Products ALL over the world companies pitched in to defeat Covid-19. Charities donated, too.

Examples range from Honeywell providing 500,000 N95 respirator masks, to 3M donated a million of them.

3M also donated a second shipment of masks while the charitable foundation of Bristol Myers Squibb funded an additional 220,000 N95 masks for doctors and nurses shipping them to centers where the outbreaks were the worst.

Since then, China has expanded its output of disposable surgical masks and daily production soared from about 10 million earlier this year to 115 million at the end of the March.

acturing Gears to Fight Coronavirus Just image...no opening day in Baseball. No crack of the bat...no popcorn...no branded t-shirts...nothing. Fanatics--one of the country’s premier MLB jersey makers--is using its pinstripes to make medical gowns and masks. Talk about inqenuinity!

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Living With Pandemics in the Future & How they can A

The evidence so far denies reason to panic but justifies contingency pl

Its pretty clear that things will return to normal, but after the virus there will be many changes to how we work and how businesses are run. The Corona virus is having a generational type affect on the nation. Its affect is very similar to other catastrophic events like the bombing of the World Trade Center and WWII. Before the outbreak happened the promotional products industry was doing extremely well and we know that once the pandemic is over that it will return like a lion’s roar. And to help things move forward we see that the tariff wars will in fact go by the wayside. They have to at this point because the financial burden will be too severe and cheaper prices must come about.

What happened to the promotional products industry was just like what happened in other industries like auto. The beginning of the supply chain--the raw materials--were affected and that started to draw things to a close immediately. Without raw materials you can’t make any finished goods...and when that happens all of the parts of the supply chain shut down.

What does the future hold?

Some of it will be good, others parts of it will be bad, but the gloom and doom will not run our direction. We are a resilient people and we will just have to remember that we’ve recovered from events like this in the past.

We will rebuild...just like we did the World Trade Center.

Affect Your Promotional Products Programs

lanning.

The affect on the promotional products industry will be on many levels. One of the key changes in how we operate will be in how we design the contingency planning of how we brand. But we will also find that technology will be in the forefront of our industry whereas before this pandemic promo products were not as mobile or a Internet connected industry as it should have been.

More and more promotions will have some sort of web-based connection. And as we have reliably predicted for some time, the promotional products industry will focus more on using brand name items.

Promo products is also an industry that is capable of evolving very quickly and it will.

We see the future and there will be a strong resurgence in the promotional products industry, perhaps far in advance of many other business segments. And while segments of our industry will be affected--like travel, events, conferences, trade shows and other large gatherings--we will rebound because promo products lend a heavy hand when used to advertise your brand.

Plan on reinventing your branding programs to fit the changing times...

What will happen is there will be a surge of new promotions and branding. For example, hygiene will be on the forefront of promotions. Hand sanitizers, masks and other products will be branded and that part of your promo business will actually increase exponentially.

For example, companies will start offering hand sanitizers everywhere but you’ll also see an entire new litany of products related to “keeping healthy”. Home delivery of promotional products will also dramatically increase; in our industry we call it “split shipping”. You’ll be able to order thousands of products and instead of delivering them at an event, you’ll ship them to your clients. That could be one of the biggest boons to your branding success...delivering to your client’s home or business especially as the shift from an office to home-based work is inevitable.

But other things will also change the face of promotions. We’ll see a bigger effort by “Made in America” so that we can have less dependence on overseas promotional products. We guess the lesson was learned this time around with the steep tariffs and how that cost us billions of dollars in taxes...that WE paid and went directly into the US Treasury.

Plus, companies who never thought of having a contingency plan will put several into process. Branding, as we know it today, will have a different spin on it. Be savvy.

We, as your Promotional Products Distributors, will help you steer through this new world. Our longstanding partnerships with you--our Promotional Products Buyers--will enable you to recover from future pandemics because we will focus on how to take you through the issues.

Count on us...in any crisis.

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Promotions Will Serve Most people in the promotional products industry saw a complete halt to all activities when the pandemic broke out. It’s like nothing any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. But for some promoting their brand while doing something to help resolve the crisis didn’t stop them...in fact for some companies it was a time to step up and spend more money on using their branding to be more socially responsible.

There are so many stories to share in this regard. For example, the New England Patriots--a staunch competitor against any NY team--used their jumbo jet to ferry in free all sorts of medical supplies for NYC. Google established a Covid-19 fund that enables all of their G-Suite customers free video conferencing until July. Restaurants like the Ideal Bite Community Kitchen are donating food. LVMH--parent company of Christian Dior, Guerlain and Givency are manufacturing hand sanitizer and giving it to the French Government. U-Haul is giving students free storage for a month.

Amazon created a $25 million fund to help delivery drivers and seasonal workers.

What this all means is...this kind of community thinking is here to stay. Brands will--now and in the future--think harder about how, what and why they should contribute to the communities they are serving.

There are many companies that will look at Covid-19 as a great opportunity to do good...doing good is always welcome.

These kinds of acts actually seem like your can get double the “good old boy” points.

Nestle and Meal Kit Freshly donated half a million dollars to Meals on Wheels America. They put the food in logoed bags for distribution. Barcardi launched #raiseyourspirits to help staff of closed bars and restaurants...pledging $3 million...staying this was just the start of a major campaign. All of these events will include branded merchandise with the company’s logo on them. ALL of them.

Here’s a little bit of advice...and some thoughts on how to build your branding theme in the world of the Corona Virus.

Relevant: Focus on an area that is important to you and your customers.

Impactful: Focus on something that will have an impact on both your company and your clients. Choose something that will solve a real and pressing problem.

Doable: Focus on what you can really do...without dreams you have no aspirations...but what can you deliver realistically and in a short time frame.

Here are questions to consider.

--How do you want to tell this story and using promotional products to cement it?

--How does this story relate to your brand’s history and branding future?

-What value are you contributing to your community?

--What do you want your customers to walk away with as your Brand Ambassadors?

It’s really up to your--th Products Buyer--to dete purpose but doing so w things for the commun your brand.

e a Higher Purpose

he Promotional ermine your higher will reap great nity you server and

Use the formula called RID to help determine your branding strategy post Covid-19.

RELEVANT IMPACTFUL DOABLE

Summer and Fa Summer this year will probably get off to a slow start but it will show a big big bang return to “normal” about mid-July. People in general will be “so done with feeling locked” up they will explode with the desire to resume their normal lives. Yes there will be plenty of BBQ’s and outside events. Just keep in mind that people will still probably want to have some social distancing if you are having events. Make it easy for them to do so.

First promo: “Celebrate Summer and the Return to Normalcy”. This includes hundreds of ideas. From having open houses to “reacquaint your staff with your customers”; to sponsoring educational events on planning for the next corona-virus; showing love for your community with a really cool promo item; and demonstrating how your brand will protect its consumers in the future. There are a million ideas.

Back to School...will be the biggest its ever been. Don’t you know that parents will be so glad to send their kids off to school because they are almost at the busting point? We have to say...LOL on that one.

Build Loyalty Programs. Tell your consumers how much you’ll do in the future to be there for them in the case of another pandemic. Tell them how you’ll make life easier for them while working with your company...all the time using

Promotional products to make them your Brand Ambassadors.

also use this time what may lie ahea

Host a “Flash Sale” during a heat wave.

There’s no better way to get customers in your doors than this. Just make sure your office/store are air-conditioned and you have a really cool promotional item to give them for coming.

Halloween will be the same. The goo costumes generall the transmission o minimal. That’s so about and play on with your logo on protect your custo same time promot you could certainl business for the “b

Fourth of July will be just “OK” this year as it will be really close to when the virus is subsiding. However, you can do your part by actively supporting America, Americans and what they did while the virus was wreaking havoc on our citizens. You can run trivia promotions about your business, or American culture. For example, how many people originally signed the Declaration of Independence? (Just two).

You can also tempt your customers with a promotion tied to the temperature. If it goes above a certain temp, have your customers come in to receive a “cool” gift...so if its 95 degrees give away your promotional item to the first 95 customers.

Labor Day Weekend will be the calm before the storm. What we are saying is this. If the virus returns in the Fall as it has been anticipated you should use this special weekend to unite your customers with your organization. Give them something special that they’ll remember. You can

Make a “Falliday” P many interesting t Just about any day after Labor Day we the limit here and own holiday cente motion. You can a away items related redecorating your driven inside when give out home dec ranges from pictur items for the kitch

We think Christma the Corona Virus s late Fall--will make early Black Friday there are a ton of

Fall Promotions

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Promotion. This has twists and options. y can be a Falliday eekend. The sky is d you can create your ered around your proalso focus on giving d to renovating and r home. People are n the cold starts...and corations. That re frames to promo hen.

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Spring & Summer Hot Pr

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