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May 21, 2001 - Strategy Magazine
Special Report

Premiums & Incentives
How camel nuts can open doors
Collectibility, functionality and relevance keys to spectacular event premiums

by Laura Pratt
page B 6

A trip to a trade show or conference just isn't complete without a major booty haul. But as you pick through your bag of goodies back at the ranch, chances are that more will end up in the trash than on your desk. So what distinguishes the good stuff from the crap? And more importantly, what can you, at the dispensing end of the event premium equation, do to ensure that your giveaways fall in the former category?

"More and more," says Tom Beakbane, president of Toronto-based Beakbane Marketing, "we're finding that interesting premium ideas are tremendously good at opening doors, especially to difficult-to-reach prospects." The key, Beakbane believes, is to pick a premium with value such that, "If someone other than the named recipient took it, it would be theft."

There are several criteria that make one premium more valuable than another. Collectibility, says John Armstrong, president of Toronto-based Armstrong Partnership, is a big factor. So are functionality, quality and rarity.

"An excellent example of collectibility would be Toronto

All-Star game merchandise," Armstrong says, referring to framed, limited-edition posters produced for the MasterCard All-Star party last year. The giveaways were a big hit with hockey memorabilia collectors.

As for functionality, Armstrong holds up a golf utility knife premium given out at a golf day event. Complete with blade, divot repair tool and ball marker, the handy gadgets were put to use right then and there. Golf club cleaners that looked like Colgate-Palmolive toothbrushes were another useful item Armstrong worked on (but never got off the drawing board).

Christy Teasdale, senior VP and GM at Toronto-based Impiric, had even more success with a functional item that was immediately put to use. Impiric recently produced special hats for Sears that were distributed to the first 10,000 attendees at a Raptors game. They said, "Go Raptors Go!" on them, and had the Sears logo on one side. On the back, there was a team photo. The added bonus: when the television cameras panned the audience, fans had donned the cardboard caps, and the Sears logo shone just as brightly as the Raptors.'

And if you don't have sponsorship rights at an event, says Teasdale, don't let that stop you. Ambush marketing can get around that. "A long time ago, we handed out cardboard megaphones outside SkyDome with the logo of a non-sponsor beverage company on them. The fans took them into the event and shouted into them and waved them around. The premium itself was only relevant for the one night, but it accomplished an objective of the marketer."

As for rarity, anything that you can't buy in a store is a good bet. For instance, Armstrong's prize pack for the MasterCard Celebrity Cup promotion just winding up in Cineplex Odeon Theatres featured a signed, limited-edition All-Star hockey jersey.

But before you pick the premium, you've got to pick the target market. The potential audience of an event, along with how many people will be in attendance, what the theming of the event is, the timing (no fleece in the middle of summer) and the budget, are all front-line decisions.

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