Walk into the kitchen of almost any office in Johannesburg on a Monday morning and watch what people reach for. Someone moves past five perfectly good mugs to reach one in particular. It carries a logo: a supplier, a conference, a bank that sponsored a golf day years ago. Nobody in that kitchen thinks of it as advertising. That is exactly why it works.
Devon Jefferys, CMO of The SA Promo Group, argues that the most effective ad your company runs might be a mug (Image source: © 123rf
123rf)
Marketers argue endlessly about the cost of paid media: cost per thousand impressions, viewability, whether a two-second scroll past a video counts as being seen.
Fair questions.
But we rarely apply the same arithmetic to the objects our brands leave in people's hands. Do that, and the humble mug looks like one of the most efficient pieces of media a company owns.
I should declare an interest: I work in this industry, so test my sums rather than trust them.
The arithmetic of a useful object
Take a cautious illustration. Say a decent branded mug costs R80 delivered and its owner uses it once a working day for a single year, roughly 220 days.
That is 220 exposures for one person, before you count the colleague across the desk, the faces on a video call, or whoever washes it at home. On that one user alone, you are paying about 36 cents per exposure.
Stretch its life to three years, which anyone who has cleared out an office cupboard will call conservative, and it drops to around 12 cents.
Those are my assumptions, not an industry benchmark, and you should replace them with your own.
What matters is the shape of the curve. Paid media charges you every time it runs.
A useful object is paid for once and keeps running until it breaks or goes missing.
Quality matters too
A banner impression is a fraction of a second on a screen the reader is trying to get past. A mug is held, sometimes in both hands, at a moment of pause, in a space the owner chose.
Frequency is high, attention is gentle but real, and there is no ad blocker for a coffee cup. Repetition in a familiar context is how brands get remembered when people finally need to buy.
None of this means every branded item is a good ad. Most are not. The flimsy pen, the stress ball, the lanyard nobody asked for: all carry the cost of media and the lifespan of a flyer.
Three things
The economics only hold when the object survives and gets used, and that depends on three things.
- Usefulness comes first
An item earns its frequency by solving a small problem that keeps coming back: holding a drink, carrying lunch, keeping the rain off at a taxi rank. If it does not beat whatever is already in the cupboard, it loses the shelf and your impressions fall to zero.
- Restraint comes second
A logo the size of a side plate turns a good object into a billboard the owner never agreed to carry. Modest branding goes to work; loud branding stays at home, or in a drawer.
- Moment
A mug handed to the right buyer after a meeting that went well carries a memory with it. The same mug tipped into a conference goodie bag carries very little.
A test before you order
Before you sign off on branded items for year-end or next year's events, ask four questions.
- Would I use this every week if it had no logo on it?
- Will it still work, and look decent, after a year of normal use?
- Would the recipient happily use it in front of colleagues or clients?
- Can I estimate how often it will be seen, and divide the cost by that number?
If any of the first three answers is no, the fourth does not matter. Spend the money elsewhere. If the answers are yes, treat the item as a media line, not a gifting line.
Put it in the same spreadsheet as your digital and outdoor, with an estimated life, daily use and likely secondary viewers. Then check your guesses: note which items you see on client desks, and ask new customers where they first came across you.
The next time someone calls the merchandise budget a nice extra, run the sum in front of them. The most effective ad your company runs might already be sitting in someone's kitchen.
The real question is whether you put it there on purpose.
