Promotional Custom Food: An Appealing Gift for Anyone, Anytime.
Marketing experts often preach that to optimize your promotional item campaign, you must fully know your target market. And this is true as knowing the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral variables of your segment will result to a more customized and targeted strategy. But in the real world, segmenting the market is not always possible.
Sometimes there are situations where market segmentation is just too costly, time consuming, and unreliable. One such example is when your market encompasses a number of different segments. In situations like this, a targeted promotional campaign would just lead to a failure since you will be alienating the other segments of your target market. And if you go for several promotional product types for the various segments, you will face a ballooned cost that may not fit your marketing budget.
Another situation that would cause you some headaches in attempting market segmentation is when your dealing with something new, like a new product or a new market. In this scenario, you are just in the stage where learning which segment will serve as your main market is your primary concern. And for this situation having a giveaway that does not appeal to the majority of the populace will, in economic terms, result to an opportunity cost. The reason for this is that a segmented strategy, as is illustrated by this situation, will only give you a small piece of your potential market. Thus, you incur the opportunity cost of forgoing the bigger chunk of your potential market that you failed to detect due to a promotional gift that only attracts a smaller segment.
In the scenarios presented above, a targeted marketing product would just decrease the effectiveness of your promotional item strategy. And for these situations, it is better to utilize promo products that attracts most, if not all, of the marketing segments. And one of the best items fit for this is promotional custom food.
Promotional custom food appeals to a wide range of segments simply because everyone eats. With your logo visibly imprinted on the packaging or sometimes even on the food itself, you will have a corporate gift that will be generally appreciated by all. During tiring and stressful events like trade shows, a custom pack of candies or mints will serve as a sweet treat for your clients and would-be clients. If, on the other hand, you are targeting executives but do not have a particular industry in mind, then a box of custom chocolates or a custom labeled wine will show the big bosses how much you appreciate their business.
Many argue that promotional food has a great disadvantage in terms of longevity, or lack there of. These people believe that once promo food is consumed, the logo exposure also ends, making this promotional item unsuitable for branding and corporate identity development. But in cases where you need long and multiple logo exposures, then the best promotional food products are the ones that come in creative and attractive packages. With these giveaways, even after the food is consumed, you will still be assured of consistent logo impressions since the durable packages with your logo can still be used in various ways. Cool chocolate containers make good shelve displays, candy jars and tins, on the other hand, serve as great containers for pens, paper clips, nickels and dimes, and other trinkets. In the end, your food giveaways will be more effective since the custom food will deliver a strong impact in terms of positive reinforcement for your company during the moment of consumption, and after this, the reusable container will do the rest and provide you the very much desired continuous logo exposure for your branding strategy.
Market segmentation is a great strategy, but in situations where using this tool is not possible then custom food is the promotional item for you. As shown in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, hunger and other physiological needs are prioritized by a rational being. And if you can just provide a solution to your clients' hunger, then maybe, just maybe, they would in turn, prioritize your business.
