Promotional Products Articles & Promotional Newsletters Educational

Southern fast-food franchise Chick-Fil-A stumbled onto a marketing gold-mine a few years back with a funny, creative advertising campaign. Since Chick-Fil-A stores sell only chicken-based foods (grilled and breaded nuggets, strips, sandwiches, etc.), someone in the organization had the idea of using cows as company mascots. The concept was that the cows were huge supporters of the franchise not because of how the food tastes, but because the more business it gets, the lower the chance the cows will be slaughtered for food. The most famous ad in this campaign has the cows standing on their hind legs painting the phrase "Eat Mor Chiken" in crude, childish letters.

The campaign was so popular that Chick-Fil-A was soon imprinting the cows and their "eat more chicken" slogan on shirts, bumper stickers, watches, cups and a bevy of other promotional items, including cow stuffed animals. Customers ate the merchandise up - figuratively, of course - which translated to customers quite literally eating up Chick-Fil-A's products. In fact, the items became so desirable that the franchise was actually able to sell them instead of giving them away. So not only was Chick-Fil-A getting high mileage out of its campaign by extending the advertising to customer's cars via stickers and travel cups and to their backs via t-shirts, but they were directly making money off the campaign by selling the items in its stores!

The purpose of sharing this story is to show you that promotional merchandise does not have to be, and indeed should not be, limited to imprinted logos and phone numbers. Using humor on your promotional items can turn something ordinarily given away into something actually sought out by customers. Using an especially cool design or unusual item for your promotions can have the same effect, as can catching a trend on the ground floor (a new style of hat, for instance). There's no greater sign of success that when you have customers coming to you for marketing instead of you having to reach out to them. Such success is possible through the creative use of promotional items.