Article - How to Make the Most of Branded T-Shirts in Promotions
10 Jan 2018
How to Make the Most of Branded T-Shirts in Promotions
Companies have always used promotional items to market their brands. The promotional items serve as gifts that carry their logos and thus take their brand messages into the homes of people. Building brand familiarity takes time and loyalty comes from knowing that the particular brand stands for a certain level of quality, customer service and outlook. However, promotional items should include branded T-shirts.
How to Use the T-Shirts to Promote a Brand
Think about it – whenever you walk in a shopping mall and see someone with a branded T-shirt you tend to notice the message. Without consciously thinking about it you take in the brand message. When you want to buy a particular product within the same sector the brand name comes to mind.
When your company thus hands out or even sells branded T-shirts, the impact of your marketing efforts is more than that of just a billboard ad. The problem is that many of the advertising spaces are static and cannot be moved. With a T-shirt you gain the opposite. The person wearing it goes to various places. People see the brand message and often friends or family members will ask the wearer where they got the T-shirt. They will look at the logo and the message and even though they don’t immediately run out to go buy the product from the brand, they remember it.
Where and How to Hand Out T-Shirts
Of course, handing out branded T-shirts to just about everyone will not suffice. It will cost too much and you will want to ensure that the wearer has some connection to it. Use the T-shirts as incentives to support your business. Loyal restaurant patrons, participants in a sponsored golf day, people at a fundraiser event or a school sport team are all candidates to receive your branded T-shirts. You can hand out the T-shirts for customer loyalty. If they have bought a particular item, they get the T-shirt for free.
Take the following example – John decides to go bungee jumping at Adventure XYZ near Krugersdorp in Gauteng. He is from Nelspruit in Mpumalanga and on holiday. Adventure XYZ has a promotion. If John participates in the bungee, bridge swing and the zip line, which will cost him a considerable amount of money and courage, he gets the T-shirt stating his braveness and the logo of Adventure XYZ. Now John decides to go for the deal and gets his branded T-shirt.
He wears it with pride even back home in Nelspruit. People ask about it and he excitingly tells about the adventure he had and where he did it. Now the brand becomes familiar with people quite far from Krugersdorp and people become interested.
They too want to go there and, of course, they’ll want to bring back the T-shirts to show that they too were brave. They wear the T-shirts everywhere and more people ask about the brand. It becomes a chain reaction and just by giving out something that is perceived as valuable and worth wearing Adventure XYZ expands their geographical reach considerably.
You may not have an adventure company and may think that why would people want to wear a cleaning product T-shirt, but you can still benefit from branding in this way. Whenever you have in-store promoters, let them wear the branded T-shirts. People are more likely to stop and ask about the products when the promoters dress the part.
Add even more value by advertising at the promotion site that the buyers get a free branded T-shirt when they buy, for instance, a 5L unit of the cleaning agent. They will spend more and instead of buying the 2L unit, they will perceive that the 5L is better value for money because they get a T-shirt for free. If they have bought the 5L to get the t-shirt you can bet that they will wear it and tell people about your product.
Let Employees Wear the Clothing
Build company loyalty, unity and a sense of pride among employees by giving them branded clothing, which includes T-shirts for their casual weekends and golf shirts for workdays. They become walking billboards for your brand and they help to distinguish your brand from competitors.
Branding doesn’t have to be expensive. You can get creative with branded T-shirts as available from our product category.