Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference
By @edent
· conferences schwag UKGCXL ukgovcamp · 21 comments · 550 words · read ~8,185 times.
I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers!
But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties!
I found a small business to print my logo with edible ink onto sweets and ordered some fizzy flying saucers, mint Mentos, and fruit Mentos. They all had my company logo and name on them.
Here was my working theory. If I were a bigger sponsor, I'd have a table and people would have been able to come up to me and chat in exchange for swag. But I didn't have a dedicated space. That's OK, I could make my own space!
If you walk up to people while carrying a big bag of candy and say "Would you like a Jelly Baby an after-dinner mint?" people react with joy! Most people love being offered a sweet. It's a great way to meet people and start conversations.
It was great! It felt like I talked to all 500 attendees, I gave away most of the sweets, and I told people a little about the work I do. People had smiles on their faces and were happy to chat.
But… Here's what didn't work.
The key flaw in my cunning plan is that once you give someone a sweet with a logo on it, they eat the sweet. Now they don't have your logo to remember you by! A sticker is like a business card - a physical reminder. A sweet is gone in an instant.
The sweets are quite small and, as a consequence, the logo and text are also small. A few people didn't notice the printing or thought that the mints were designed to look like blue eyeballs.
My site has reasonable SEO if you search for "Open Ideas Ltd" - but there was no URl printed on the sweets because they were too small. And they would be eaten straight away.
Compact disks of sugar aren't the most health-conscious snack. I made sure that the treats were all vegan and gluten-free. While the big tub of flying saucers had the ingredients and allergens printed on them, the Mentos didn't. Some people were (understandably) reluctant to take unidentified sweets from a stranger.
So, lessons learned? Bring bigger sweets, with more eye-catching designs, including a clear call to action, and which are sugar-free and inedible.
Stickers. I've reinvented stickers…
And yet… I'd probably do it again! I'm not a mega-corp trying to convince people to purchase my services. I'm just this guy, you know? It can be a bit intimidating to go up to strangers and say "TALK TO ME". But saying "Hello! Would you care for a sweet?" is a socially acceptable ice-breaker.
I enjoyed the experience and, while I don't think it will lead to a 10x ROI with enhanced EBITDA and hitting my OKRs, it was a lot of fun.
My question to you is this - what's the favourite swag you've ever given out?
@Edent We had yoyos once. With LEDs and a little generator and a proper clutch, so if you knew how, you could spin the yoyo down to the end of its string, when it would light up and stay there spinning for a bit until you gave it a jerk and it came back up again.
I think I've still got mine, nearly 20 years later.
@Edent The same place also used to go to Supercomputing. We had, apparently, the best pens on the trade floor. After the first day, we were told to hide them and only the stand manager was allowed to give them out to important people, because we had so many people wandering up and asking for a pen and then just wandering off again.
@blog I like it (even being diabetic😁)!
I was always reluctant to hand it business cards, so I made one that doubled as USB sticks. It helped that I actually needed USB sticks for workshops I was giving. But it did make it easier to hand out the cards!
Mike says:
You could get larger, self adhesive, long life, very thin, sweets. Laptop decoration and emergency snack in one.
Favourite souvenirs I’ve given out were probably a set of custom postcards, just this past Monday. So fun to make and people really enjoyed them. 🦩 https://alexwlchan.net/2024/ian-flemingo/
Favourite souvenirs I’ve received are socks. They don’t trigger my aversion to wearing branded merch (unlike t-shirts), they go with a variety of outfits (and gender presentations), and they’re one of the few items I can never have too many of. 🧦
I enjoyed my mints and mentos thank you 🙏
@Edent If they were individually wrapped, you could tape them to a card with your URL, ingredients list, etc. In case there's a next time!
@Edent it’s funny you mention eyeballs. When I worked in Germany, my employer would give out candy eyeballs as swag. If memory serves they were either actual size or slightly larger. Still small enough to not be too awkward to eat.
They were individually wrapped and the wrapper featured the company name and URL along with some goofy eye-related slogan that I can’t quite remember. Something like “halten Sie uns im Auge” (keep your eye on us).
They were, if nothing else, attention-grabbing.
@blog great this worked for you. The same approach was popular even with mega corps at events I went to in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Apple, Mitsubishi and VW all produced branded sweets that were so popular people actually ended up paying £10, even £20 per sweet!
Jade Ellis says:
I actually came across an interesting solution to this last year - a small packet of mints, with the logo printed on the case. It worked great, I had it around for months. However, all the plastic in it probably isn't great for the environment.
@Edent It sounds like on a peopling level the sweets worked well and maybe paired with small business cards and/or a QR code you could combine the two.
I once cheered folk on 1st day of a post-stressful utter cluster-F of a mass office move by offering vegetarian jelly beans Dr Who style.
Great way to get people to come and say hi and talk to one another. Management couldn't even make us go back to work cos there were no PCs or phones (their mess).
Andrew Larcombe says:
Undoubtedly the Capgemini kazoos we handed out at one Drupalcon - with the added incentive that there was a prize for whoever recorded the best tune and posted it on twitter with obligatory corporate hashtags.
This wasn't dreamt up by the marketing dept - just the development team who came up with and implemented the idea over a lunch beer.
Carrie Eden says:
The promotional gift that I've kept is a pound coin shaped disc that is attached to my keyring and used for releasing supermarket trolleys (who carries cash nowadays). It always reminds me of the investment bank "ING" which I no longer use.
@Edent I was at a conference a while ago and a company was handing out chocolate bars with their logo etc. on the outer wrapper, where it would normally say "Cadbury's Dairy Milk" or whatever. This meant you could eat the treat but still keep the marketing info.
Sadly that's going to be a bit more expensive than a branded Flying Saucer.
morganism says:
You could make the sweets a bit larger, and flatter, and thicken up the print ink. Print in reverse, so it makes a tattoo when pressed on the inside of the arm. could also use a wrapper with a qrcode on the inside of it.....
Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference | Hacker News
I gave away hundreds of stress balls at events over the years. Very popular with participants.
And just remembered my least successful giveaway. I was working in embedded systems and ran a draw for the book "Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications" by Krysztof Czarnecki. The idea being you signed up with your contact info to enter the draw.
Nobody signed up despite this being a great book. My German colleague said I would have had more entries with an iPod or similar giveaway...
@Edent I love stickers AND candy, so I would approach you first for the candy and then stay for the stickers 😁
Tim Haysom says:
you might remember me walking around MWC with a branded BONDI surf board taking pictures of people with the board and then sending out real postcards with a collage of photos to everyone afterwards. Don't think anyone refused to have a photo taken and they all got a follow up afterwards through the post.
does anyone put their address on a business card anymore? 😉
Steve Lake says:
The best swag I ever gave out was when I worked at a company called Magiq - the name and marketing was based on that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic" quote, and that it was "Powered by Gnomes"
So, at a big event in Earls Court that year, we had a big stand, and gave away garden gnomes with our branding on them! They were surprisingly popular, and we got emails from all over Europe where people had taken them home and had interesting conversations with airport security on the way.
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