Why Business Gifts Work

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Picture this – thousands of years ago there is a tribe that has hunted and killed enough meat to take the tribe through the winter and they still have a sizeable surplus. They take their surplus meat around to neighboring tribes and sell or barter it. The tribe with the surplus really liked the extra disposable “income” they made from selling their surplus so they tried the same technique the next hunting season. They hunted and collected enough meat for their own tribe and they then went around and sold the surplus again.

When another tribe saw all of the little extras the selling tribe was getting with their surplus, they decided to hunt, have a surplus and sell the surplus for disposable income. Voila’, the birth of business competition. The original tribe though had a real savvy business leader who thought they ought to give a few little extras away to the tribes who had been buying their surplus –Voila’, the birth of business gifts. So for years the original surplus selling tribe continued to hunt, sell surplus and give away business gifts as tokens of their appreciation.

The moral to this story is - if business gifting has been going on for this long a time – it works. No business leader is going to throw money away on something that doesn’t help maintain or increase income. The bottom line is profit and using business gifts increases the profit margin for several reasons.

1. When business men were surveyed about whether or not they had received a business gift in the past six months, the ones who had were able to recall the name of the business and why they had received the business gift. So, business gifts make an impression that lasts.

2. Research indicates that people are more likely to do repeat business with companies who have given them a business gift or some kind of token of appreciation. In fact, the research shows that people were more likely to buy and advertised item from a company if they had received a business gift from them at one time or another.

3. When businesses have marketing campaigns that advertise a business gift or give-away of sorts, they have a better response than the marketing campaigns that do not offer business gifts.

4. If you take the time to set outcomes or goals for your marketing campaigns that have business gifts, you will be able to track the success of your efforts and you will, more than likely learn that when you offer business gifts as tokens of your appreciations to people who attend the marketing event, that you will come closer to meeting your goal than if you do not offer business gifts.  You can even determine the level of success related to cost of business gifts versus increase in sales etc.