NegativeCostMarketing

Why People will Pay you to Market your Stuff

So, you don’t believe the title to this article, huh? The fact is that people will pay you for the right and privilege to market your stuff for you. Can you think of any example of this happening today in your city or town? Sure you can—just look at your local sports teams.

Isn’t it amazing that sports fans (don’t forget that is short for ‘fanatics’) will pay not just the normal margins but super-margin prices for clothing or other items imprinted with their favourite team’s logo on it?


Gee, Reverse Cost Marketing Does Exist After all

They will happily walk around (like out-of-work folks did during the Great Depression of the 1930s wearing sandwich boards in exchange for food) with a Lakers’ Jersey or a Raiders Cap promoting their affiliation with their team.

It wasn’t that long ago that people use to keep their underwear inside their clothes and, by the way, keep the manufacturers nametag hidden too. Now, they think nothing of having Calvin Klein prominently displayed on their CK clothing or purse or wallet or whatever and, better still (at least, for CK’s bottom line), they will pay CK for that right to advertise Calvin Klein.


People Used to Keep their Underwear Hidden

Now that is negative cost marketing.

So how does that impact the promotional products industry? Well, it matters a lot—the industry has to move up the value chain and offer large, national clients and even local clients too the type of solutions they need in order to keep ahead of their competition and to stand out in a noisy environment. Remember promotional products work because they are on display for months or years even.

Pepsi recently unveiled a new campaign (http://www.pepsistuff.ca/), which not only ‘sells’ Pepsi branded merchandise but co-brands some of the stuff with partners like Reebok, Sony, Timex and others. Presumably, their partners are also helping to pay the freight on this.


Pepsi Cobrands with Partners like Reebok

Now it’s true that Pepsi is not actually selling their merchandise for cash but it might as well be—they are using Pepsi points instead but the more a consumer drinks and the more Pepsi they buy, the more points they get so, in a way, Pepsi is getting paid. And these points programs work really well when the program owner (Pepsi) sells points wholesale for cash to others (like Reebok, Sony, Timex, RogersATT, FamousPlayers and more) who in turn use these points in their loyalty programs. (E.g., buy a cell phone from RogersATT and get so many hundred or thousand Pepsi points…) This leverages the investment and turns this marketing program into a negative cost in a hurry.

What all this means is that the promotional products industry has get out of the simplistic product pushing business and into the solutions space. It is a better to pitch to talk to your clients and tell them that, maybe, they can make money promoting their products. The industry has to examine every one of its client’s requirements and ask the seemingly contradictory question: “Will people pay for Free Stuff (FS)?”

Mark Gencher, Executive Vice-President, Brymark.com, one of Canada’s leading providers of TQA marketing solutions in the promotional products space. mark@brymark.com