Personal vs. Desk Based Corporate Gifts

Requests for desk based corporate gifts are a frequent one that I get as a corporate gift specialist. Often my clients question whether they should give a desk based corporate gift or a personal use corporate gift.

The answer lies in what you wish you achieve with your corporate gifts. Is it a relationship building corporate gift or an adverting gift?

Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion. If your chief reason for giving out the gift is for advertising then the branding should be very prominent and visible. In this case a desk based corporate gift is an excellent idea.

This kind of corporate gift should be novel and useful so that it will actually be used by the recipient and thus promoting your brand. It should draw the eye of people to the item. Remember that the person who is already a client may enjoy the corporate gifts, but as they are an existing customer the primary focus of this gift is to draw attention of people who are not yet customers to your product, unless your goal is to reinforce your brand. This means that if this corporate gift is highly visible to passers by it will be noticed and it will thereby activate the brand building capabilities of this corporate gift.

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is an industry term for software solutions that help enterprise businesses manage customer relationships in an organized way. An example of a CRM would be a database containing detailed customer information that management and salespeople can reference in order to match customer needs with products, inform customers of service requirements, etc.

Corporate gifts can be good relationship-building tools for expressing appreciation and gratitude towards your most valued employees, customers.

These corporate gifts have a primary focus to build the relationship between you and your customer. As the relationship is the primary goal of this corporate gift, go for subtle branding. Don’t use your client as a human advertisement. Rather build the relationship with your corporate gifts and turn the customer into an advocate for your copy, because their referrals will mean a lot to your business and your reputation. You can make use of branded ribbon and branded gift wrap to enhance the brand and advertise your product especially upon delivery when a lot of your client’s colleagues are likely to see the corporate gift, but always put the customer first when deciding how to brand this corporate gift.

For relationship building corporate gifts we recommend that you give a gift that they can use even at home. Some ideas include wine gifts, binoculars, hampers, books, jackets, watches etc.