Welcome to Employee Incentive!

When rewarding your employees, don't write off Promotional Products as perceived "free stuff'. A recent study shows that Promotional Items rank high in value when rewarded in employee recognition programs. Most companies have an employee recognition program and consider them important to boost morale and retaining employees. Losing employees is costly and keeping the current employees happy is becoming increasingly important.

According to Incentive Marketing Association (IMA) Corporate America spends $46 billion dollars each year on incentives for its employees

In the study, IMA defines Promotional Products as Incentive Merchandise as reads: Merchandise used as part of an incentive or recognition program, targeted to employees, sales people, customers, business partners, distributors, dealers and/or consumers. These may be a variety of consumer products of different values, as well as gift certificates/gift cards. This does include token items such as advertising specialties (e.g., key chains, luggage tags, pens, etc.).

Larger companies have significantly higher usage of Promotional Items than smaller merchandise. 48% of the larger companies had used Promotional Products but only 30% of the smaller companies.

This is an indicative figure that clearly shows that smaller companies need to invest more aggressively in in building their brand and employee retention through Promotional Products. Several companies indicated they needed more information about Promotional Products and how to measure the benefits, the return on investment and how management could become more receptive to Promotional Merchandise.

It was also notable that on a 10-point scale, Promotional Items as a category scored at 7.5 in effectiveness of motivation methods for rewarding an employee. According to the study, giving your employees branded merchandise such as T-Shirts, Tote Bags etc.) is considered almost on par with receiving a cash reward as a motivational method.

This is great news and marketing departments and HR departments should be paying attention because here is a unique, cost effective opportunity to reward your employees with a strong, up to date Promotional Item Program!

When rewarding employees through recognition programs there is large universe of Promotional material to choose from. If you are truly rewarding your employees, you can choose from high end materials such as Martin glasses, Champagne Glasses or other forms of glass ware. If you are keeping it more low key, T-shirts, Mouse pads and Tote Bags will still do the job - especially if they are up to date and according to the latest trends.

Trends are important - and according to many similar studies, they play a vital part in the popularity of the Promotional Product program.

The study also showed that only 23% of the respondents viewed Incentive Merchandise as cost while 77% reviewed it as an investment.