For small companies starting out, one of the most important things to have, other than a great product or service, is a strong brand. The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars a year to build or maintain their brand supremacy. It isn’t easy to establish your brand, but sometimes a few simple steps can help; I’m going to look at one of these steps, and analyze the effectiveness of giving away promotional materials (swag) for the remainder of this post.

Case Study of Promotional Advertising and Branding: Geni.com

After mentioning a great new company called Geni.com in a previous blog post, (Geni has become the place to go for family social networking) I was contacted by the company. As a result of their email, I wrote a post about the power of effective follow-up in marketing, where I talked about how following up with your users/customers is essential. The company told me they’d send some free swag because I’m such a fan (and because it is a great branding opportunity) and I promised to do a final wrap-up post if the company came through and sent me some cool stuff.

Did they ever! They came through with flying colors, shipping me (via Fedex, no less) a mousepad, pens, stickers, a baseball hat, and 2 t-shirts.


good marketing

geni swag

Think it’s just a cheap ploy? Lets look at what the result of sending me the swag will be:

  • As you can tell, I look good in that shirt! I’m definitely going to sport it around town, providing a lot of really cheap branding for Geni.
  • When I tell my friends about the site, I’m sure to mention the stuff they sent me and I’ll certainly use words like “cool” and “check it out”.
  • I’m now writing the 2nd post completely devoted to Geni and how they are smart in their marketing. This provides the company with even more publicity.
  • I’ll probably give the stickers away to some local kids because I have no real use for them. This is great for the company because kids love stickers and they are sure to put them somewhere interesting and visible.

All in all, giving away promotional materials is a smart, inexpensive, and effective way to help build the strength of your brand.

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