It has been experienced over the years that India is very cost effective when sourcing handmade promotional products from India. China has strength with machines due to very large investment to produce big volumes but looses out to India the moment the product is labor intensive. Due to this very reason we have been very successful in delivering materials to almost all Continents consisting of developed and developing Countries against quotations from China. Interestingly apart from end buyers even the trade partners finds it worthwhile to source and supply to their corporate customers. We also have strategic arrangements with various partners from US and Europe to source from us and directly supply to their end customers in India and nearby Countries.
Corporate Gifts
10 Characteristics of a Great Value Proposition
The tree which gives fruits for many years also needs a humble beginning with a single seed to start the whole process of giving. Similarly to get lifelong customers for your products you need to understand and encourage trial of your products before the user gives their loyalty back to you. You as a manufacturer have invested so much to create the new product and now must convince the prospective customers of value of your offering by encouraging trials. The loyalty of the user can be earned by ensuring the product is used and tasted and for that first step is creating awareness for your products. Corporate gifts as an additional free offer helps you lubricate the giant wheels of trials faster and cheaper to establish both your product and brand at the market place with all important stakeholders.
The first hurdle when you would like to start the corporate gifting activities is what to give and for that answer let us understand each recipient’s profile in more details. Broadly we can classify the various target audience profile as consumers, customers, partners, influences, employees and associates. Once you get clarity on each profile then depending on their role and importance the budget can be created. The budget helps you in identifying the various product choices available within that price range to get the maximum mileage keeping you end objective and purpose in the mind.
CONSUMERS
The correct definition of the consumer is the actual user or end consumer of your product or services. Since the lifetime value of a consumer is very high most of the brands are willing to invest high budget to influence and acquire new users. When you as a brand owner team is very confident about the offering of your product or services then to ensure more meaningful trials you offer attractive corporate gifts to encourage more consumers to try your new products.
When we introduce ourselves to our new clients the first question they routinely ask is what are your range of gifting products? Our usual answer is EVERYTHING FROM A PIN TO A PLANE and add up that we have indeed supplied a cargo company desktop gift item with a plane. We have made miniature models of buses and tractors replicating their full size model through moulds to help them impress their target audience as desk top items. Just to make it easy for all corporate buyers we are giving list of most commonly used generic business gift items which are as follows:-
MOUSE PADS:- Mousepad can be made of foam and rubber bottom base with your artwork at the top to remind the user about you and your products 24×7. The printed top sheet can be protected through lamination to increase the life of the mouse pad and with knurling at the top to ensure that cursor of optical mouse behaves and is under your control.
E-commerce has made life easy for the start-ups to display and book orders for their new ideas in very cost effective manner! However, after the proof of the concept the next immediate challenge for them is to scale up by generating volumes and creating a ready marketing and distribution infrastructure for their goods and services! To generate volumes to lower the cost of their manufactured goods they need bulk sales and enough trials before they can even start selling at brick and mortars. Once the product has been tried and liked by masses then placing it on shelves becomes easy due to inquiry and demand from the end users. A big marketing and distribution lesson is that what is seen is bought and that in the beginning you need to push your products like a rocket which takes a lot of energy to get off the ground but thereafter it becomes relatively easy.
The world is becoming a global village is the most common statement we keep hearing in our daily life to highlight the importance of movement of goods and services across the globe. It started with online knowledge services, outsourcing of services offline of all non-core activities and finally of even physical goods. China became the manufacturing hub for hard currencies and helped even other cheap labour Countries to have a role in manufactured goods. Disruptive technologies gave rise to new business models and helped forward looking companies to create the global procurement division. Here again the initial focus was on raw materials and slowly and steadily now it has come down to even promotional corporate gifts.
Most of the MNCs have created the global procurement division and the role is very clear to find out the best rates at each operational location and to streamline the processes so as to source the various goods from the various geographies at the most economical manner.
The confidence comes because of starting and building the stationary channel at Kolkata and Bangalore. Our principal Abee Printer Ribbons Limited was so happy with our Karnataka and West Bengal results that they pushed us to start the Chennai branch during 1998 over his 5-year-old existing distributor who was after the initial success was failing to grow the sales due to lack of proper distribution. Within 6 months we created a robust channel but principal naturally thought that two distributors will do more justice to the state and in the process killed our new branch and their product due to their short term policies at Chennai. Dot matrix printer ribbons demand was not elastic in nature resulting in big clash between wholesale and distribution market operating prices resulting in creating I lose – you lose situation for all involved. I have seen the channel distribution success when I was a very young and still a student with diabetic wooden glasses, glycerin soaps and cosmetics around eastern India. Within a year the product made so much noise that there was an excise raid and I personally preferred to move out due to high excise duties at that time. That Company today is doing over 100 crores turnover with manufacturing facilities in excise free zones.
The pharma sector promotes their brands through the doctors and thus need a mechanism to get into the minds of their target audience the doctors. Pharma companies do so by identifying the USP of their product or the differentiate against existing available drugs to influence the doctors to start prescribing their new discoveries. For this they need a concept to work around and tell the story to their medical representatives who in turn start pass on the story to all doctors on their periodical visits. The story created as per the above concept has a touch point in the form of ideally a table top gift with the drug name to help the doctor recall and start prescribing the new medicine. After few prescriptions and feedback from the patients the doctor is in a position to recall the drug name comfortably thereby helping the new discovery and new innovations to serve the patients better.
For example, a new drug which works very fast in the blood was needed to be communicated to the concerned doctors. The product team decided to use the fast bowling concept to convey the message to the doctors. Accordingly, a table top pen stand was conceptualized with cricket ball with hole for the pens as the pen stand.
If you are a small and medium enterprises in India with very low budget on customized corporate gifts, then you must have faced the challenge of sourcing the same and that too at reasonable prices! Gifting is a fragmented market with one-man show making the viability for the operator difficult if the order size is small. Further, if you try to source the smaller quantities from the personalized gift vendors whose business model is single customized piece then the price per piece for you becomes very high. Outside India in advance countries the business model is stock and sell with limited products choices given for online orders which works out well for both the buyer and the seller. But Indian buyers are very price sensitive and when order size is very small for SMB business outfits or various project teams (who many times are part of large companies) cost effective solutions are desired. To counter this challenge, we have come out with back office solutions which mainly interacts over the email and phone to service the clients. Wherever we have local city operations the sample can be physically shown to the clients and for the rest of the cases the courier service is used after shortlisting the products through email exchanges.
We are the Indian manufacturers and exporters of promotional Corporate Gifts and our assurance is “Everything From A Pin To A Plane”. Due to very high demand and fairly large gap in the market we are appointing re-seller partners all over India. One-man show has limited bandwidth and therefore cannot do justice with dual role of order booking and reliable sourcing from multiple factories at a good price due to very low volumes. Our large team’s expertise in variety, reliability and consistency of experience makes it easy for a re-seller partner to focus on booking more and more orders thereby retaining and increasing his loyal customers base. Corporate Gifts is a fragmented market with many one man show entrepreneurs trying to make a living by serving SMB customers. One of the critical challenge is to get the initial hand holding so that they can settle down in this high churn business. We have many partners who are reselling the products to their end customers and both are happy as the end buyer is getting the reliable solution from his trusted vendor.