In certain respects, choosing promotional products based on price is a good rule of thumb. Inexpensive items such as promotional plastic pens, or slightly more pricy items such as mugs and mouse mats are always good casual items—items that you may give out fairly often to both employees and clients. These are inexpensive enough that you can afford to give them out to people on a regular basis, and they’re casual enough that doing so won’t be considered inappropriate.
Inexpensive items are also the best option for business events such as trade shows and exhibitions. You may give out a large number of items on such occasions and they will by necessity need to be fairly inexpensive. Attracting people to your exhibition booth will also require that your items be eye-catching, too—in these cases, colorful items and items with moving parts are always a good option. Attention-getting items such as those in the Liquid Aqua range, noisemakers, Magic Cubes, shirts and bags, and other items that can be obtained in a range of bright colors are all great options.
Giving expensive promotional gifts such as a bottle of wine or an executive pen set is definitely not something you’ll want to do every day—these types of items are best reserved for special occasions, where you want to commemorate events in your professional relationships or special events in the lives of your employees and business associates. And consider, too, that these items must also be matched to the occasion. An executive pen set is a great gift to mark an important business occasion, such as the promotion of a valued employee, but a bottle of wine is a much more appropriate gift if they’ve recently celebrated an important event in their personal life, such as a marriage or the birth of a child.
Choosing items that your recipients will enjoy getting and using is another hurdle that must be overcome. This is one reason why functional items—such as desktop items and other items that are useful for work—are so popular. These types of items are available in a wide range of prices, too, so it’s not overly difficult to choose a variety of business gifts that will be suitable for different occasions. Welcome new employees with a selection of promotional desktop items and office supplies, such as calendars, calculators, mouse pads and pens, gift employees with a tote bag or laptop bag if they travel often on work-related business, and save the really expensive items such as executive pen sets or crystal paperweights to commemorate a promotion or other important work-related event. All of these items can be appropriate for clients and business associates, too.