Friendly reminder: Click the blue text above to follow "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting" for more insights on marketing and distributor internal management. If promotion is a course in the 4P feast, then promotional items are the salt. They may seem inconspicuous, but too much or too little can skew the taste of the dish. Promotional items are not optional, nor are they used routinely; rather, when appropriately deployed based on actual market competition, they can achieve twice the result with half the effort, leveraging a small force to move a large weight. A promotional item is something that, when seen by target customers, triggers an impulse to buy and drives sales growth. It can be a gift with purchase, the product itself, or value-added services. Some might say choosing promotional items is simple: just calculate the budget, figure out the items, and place the order. Many unimaginative marketing people do exactly that: if a competitor buys instant noodles and gives away ham sausages, they follow suit; "buy one get one free" campaigns are everywhere; "open the lid and win" promotions abound... After all this hustle, the gift manufacturers are happiest, but the campaign results are not as explosive as imagined. A small promotional item may look simple, but choosing a good one is no easy task. Types of Promotional Items 1. By function: gifts and products. Gifts are further divided into those used directly and those not used directly. Direct-use examples: buying a house and getting furniture, buying a phone and getting a memory card or battery, buying a bucket of instant noodles and getting pickled vegetables or ham sausages. Indirect-use examples: buying a phone and getting a scarf. Products are divided into homogeneous and heterogeneous. The former includes buying a beverage and getting a beverage; the latter includes buying a beverage and getting a small fan. Homogeneous can be further subdivided into same specification and different specifications. For example, buying a 600ml bottle of beverage and getting a 600ml bottle of the same or another flavor; or buying a 1.5L bottle and getting a canned beverage. 2. By target: consumer promotions, channel promotions, public relations, etc. Channel promotions may range from cars and travel to a bottle of water, depending on the promotional intensity and expected effect. Consumer promotions are basically physical items or consumption rights (coupons) worth no more than 5,000 yuan per transaction. The author has seen the same thing in different companies: due to insufficient understanding of the market by the planning department, or other changes, excessive promotional items were purchased. Gifts originally prepared for a specific promotion were labeled with the campaign slogan and even the promotional and date information. By the time the date had long passed, sales had not reached the expected boom, but the warehouse was piled high with gifts. On the other extreme, too few gifts were purchased, leading not only to customer complaints and conflicts at the terminal but also allowing competitors to seize customers and market share. The purpose of promotional items is to integrate existing promotional resources to boost sales of existing products. Based on this purpose, the FUN principle for selecting promotional items is: The FUN Principle for Selecting Promotional Items: F - Funny. Fun and interesting. Only interesting things can attract consumers. Otherwise, why would you think consumers would appreciate something you don't even like? Especially in consumer-themed promotions, when everyone gives away items that are barely related or unrelated to the activity, consumers become aesthetically fatigued, greatly diminishing the campaign's effect. How to choose highly relevant promotional items based on the characteristics of the activity and the promoted product is key to success. Build your own promotional gift library, regularly seek inspiration from the market, have gift companies send product catalogs periodically, communicate with distributors and the sales team to understand channel needs, chat with consumers, and so on. This way, your promotional items are targeted and the campaign becomes more meaningful. U - Unique. Unique and high quality. Think carefully and act ahead of others to be unique—be a leader in promotion, not a follower. Leaders get the most attention with the least resources; followers must spend more to compete. Besides thinking carefully and acting promptly, collaborating with companies from other industries is another way to make promotional items unique. For example, limited-edition gifts available only through the campaign. Behind uniqueness lies high quality. It should look valuable and be chosen according to the product's characteristics. Promotional items should have high use value but low liquidity. For example, buying a car and getting a bunch of small things like floor mats—consumers today feel these are not only valueless but might as well be converted into a discount on the car price. N - Necessary. Necessity principle. Choose promotional items based on competitive needs, not just for the sake of promotion. For example, when regional sales staff see sales decline, they shout, "Dear marketing department, hurry up and do a buy-one-get-one promotion!" The marketing department, without thorough investigation, quickly buys a bunch of things and sends them down, only for the gifts to end up sleeping in the warehouse of the local sales office. Consider input-output. Based on strict sales forecasts, determine the gift budget, take stock of existing usable promotional items, and set purchase quantities. Economy does not simply mean spending less; it means reasonably considering the input-output relationship, achieving more output with less input. Otherwise, you might spend a lot with little effect, leaving gifts piled up in the warehouse, or lose market opportunities by being stingy, and even lose the chance to spend next time. For the marketing department, selecting promotional items is a thankless job. If you choose without thinking and send the gifts down, either the frontline sales complain about insufficient quantity, lack of appeal, poor quality, etc., or channel customers exploit loopholes to cash in or complain about low gift value. Ultimately, this is a problem of insufficient information collection. Only by truly thinking about the meaning of the campaign before the market promotion plan, and carefully selecting promotional items based on the psychology of the audience and communicators, can you make consumers and customers love the campaign and make it truly FUNNY. --------------------------------------------