There might not be anything more basic than promotions involving badges, or buttons or lanyards for that matter. Place a logo on a piece of plastic, metal or cloth, give it to someone to wear, and you’re set. Basic, however, doesn’t necessarily mean less of a promotion. There’s a reason, after all, that the expression “Going back to the basics” means taking a step back and focusing on what is known to work.
Just because they are basic doesn’t mean they are going to work every time because they’re simple. Anyone serious about their craft, from athletes and artists to salespeople and journalists, will surely tell you that there are parts of their job considered basic that they still haven’t quite mastered. There is science, skill and complexity in well-executed tasks, no matter how straightforward they appear on the surface. With this in mind, below several badge, button and lanyard suppliers give examples of some of the more memorable ways their products have been used, revealing a bit of the complexity behind simple successes.
BADGES: The name game
Millions of these little plastic or metal wonders exist throughout the retail world, and yet figuring out how to use them beyond the standard employee name tag might seem a little difficult. As pointed out by Eric Johnson, MAS, vice president of sales and development for Halls & Company, Brooklyn Park, Minn., and Richard Ouellette, president of Zoogee World Inc., Calais, Maine, a creative way to approach badge promotions involves not avoiding their common use as name tags, but rather embracing it.
Johnson described a promotion where a grocery store wanted to use more than the basic name badge for its employees. The distributor who had been providing the normal badges to the store convinced them to modify the tags to show an employee’s total years of service—thus illustrating to both customers and new workers how qualified each staff member would be at answering their questions. “Although every year an employee would need to get a new name badge, they determined that the recognition benefits far outweighed the additional costs,” said Johnson. Not only was the distributor able to help the store with its customer service and employee training, it also increased the total size of its yearly reorder a fair bit. And while bigger orders may sound like the way to go with badge promotions, Ouellette described a successful promotion that is an inversion of Johnson’s example.
After distributors?made it clear that end-buyers with high employee turnover rates needed help keeping up with employee name badges, Zoogee World set out to create a low-cost solution. It came up with the Write-on Badge, an item that features a magnetic attachment, a domed imprint and the ability to be written on with any dry-erase marker.
Ouellette explained that what makes the Write-on Badge so great is not only its ability to lower end-user costs, but also how it does away with the technical hassle of name badge creation. “They do not need to gather up all the names, review them for accuracy, put them on an Excel spreadsheet and then e-mail them to us as is the case in permanent imprint name badges,” he said, adding the end-user does not even have to bother setting up a printer to print inserts for reusable window badges. With careful penmanship, Ouellette said the badge will appear just like a permanent-imprint badge, and that the item is also useful in restaurants or other places where staff may want to display a daily special.
BUTTONS: The life of the party
Though arguably the smallest and simplest promotional item, the tiny attachable logos still have quite a bit of marketing muscle behind them. Buttons’ value to political campaigns is well-known, but less so might be their use for parties having nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats.
Rich Carollo, vice president of marketing for Lion Circle Corporation, Chicago, explained a few different ways buttons can be used at large organized parties or events, most involving the buttons being imprinted with numbers, either non-repeating or in pairs. “They’ll use them as a pass, or a door prize where they’ll call the number,” He said. Carollo also described a way that buttons could be used as an icebreaker, setting participants to find their matching number in a crowd in order to win a prize.
Interesting promotions, to be sure, but Carollo was careful to add that numbering on buttons is not a flawless process. “There’s always waste involved with the products,” he said. “When you do a consecutive number programs like that […] there could be a couple of missing numbers throughout the promotion.”
LANYARDS: Everywhere you look
For someone not heavily involved in the lanyard industry, it might be a little hard to see all the marketing possibilities a cloth loop meant to hold keys or a badge really has. If you think about it though, there are a lot of situations out there where keys or badges are a necessity, meaning, of course, there are also many opportunities for lanyards sales. Frank Rocco, vice president of business relations for Marathon/Prestige, New Philadelphia, Ohio, listed a few instances he remembered: An auto-show promotion for the launch of a new truck, a gift-bag item for a major cruise line that was paired with customers’ I.D.s, and as part of workplace identification for a machinists union. These were not little orders either—Rocco said the order for the union was around 150,000, the truck promotion was 350,000, and the cruise line totaled a staggering 850,000 lanyards. From these order sizes, it’s obvious that the end-buyers took the marketing ability of lanyards seriously.
That’s not to say, however, that lanyards are relegated to the realm of commodity items. Megan Ludow, director of marketing and compliance for SnugZ USA, Salt Lake City, described several creative promotions that used the company’s lanyards. One example that came up a few times was lanyards being used as in-store advertising. She gave instances of gas station attendants wearing them to boost lottery ticket sales, video game store clerks advertising a new console launch and a department store that used them to promote sales within the store.
According to Ludow, the department store “printed different specials to be inserted into the vinyl pouches to promote specific sales within other departments of the store,” meaning that a salesperson in the shoe department could be wearing an ad for the bed and bath department, or coupons for an upcoming sale. “This was very successful because they could advertise without the salesperson having to verbally mention the sale,” she explained.
