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As if it’s not bad enough to realize that summer is over, the end of September also brings another burden to corporate marketers: What to give our best customers as an end-of-year token of our company’s appreciation?

Corporate gift-giving is tricky business. First, you have to find something that is affordable (but not chintzy), clever (but not sarcastic), and personal (but not offensive). Then, it’s nice to be able to draw some parallel to the gift you are giving and the product or service your company provides. And finally, you have to decide on this appropriate and memorable gift sometime in the next 10 days if you want to have any hope of getting it to customers before Valentine’s Day.

In all the years I helped select end-of-year gifts for my own marketing agency and also for my clients, I witnessed my share of winners and losers. The most successful gift ever (if judged solely on the recipients’ response) was a high-quality electric pepper mill which was pad-printed with a tasteful blue logo and mailed with a refill of gourmet peppercorns. (Note to ad agencies and fulfillment houses: Despite the recipients’ universal adoration of this gift, be warned that if you give this gift, you’ll also need to purchase eight AAA batteries per mill, insert seven of the eight batteries into each mill, and somehow tape the remaining battery in a conspicuous spot so people know you didn’t gyp them out of a battery. Why not put all eight batteries into the pepper mill? Because you don’t want to hear 500 boxes of client gifts wildly grinding expensive peppercorns the whole way to the Post Office — and probably the whole way to Union, New Jersey, or wherever else your gifts are going. Oh, and the postage to mail this heavyweight will kill your budget faster than 48 hours of pepper-grinding will kill your batteries.)

Another example of a client gift that was a brilliant idea but executed poorly was one I received from an ad agency that was doing work for my company. It was a 10MB jump drive, printed with the agency’s logo and pre-loaded with a custom-built “Gift Tracker” database in which the recipient could log the names and birthdates of friends and relatives, then track all the gifts sent to that person over time. The jump-drive was universally useful; the custom-built database was an excellent way for the agency to show its ability to build proprietary software tools for clients; but probably more than half of the recipients (including all of them at my company) lacked Access database on their laptops — rendering the database aspect of the gift completely useless.

So, tomorrow I will wake up, flip over the calendar, and briefly panic that we have to figure out a brilliant, affordable and non-offensive gift for our clients. Then I’ll wonder if the economy is still so bad that we can avoid the agony of choosing the wrong gift, and instead make a generous (and error-free) gift to a charitable cause.

Marketing