Is There A Perfect Corporate Gift?

Since retail, including retail giants, are made up of humans, it is prone to error. It is also prone to success.

One example is Starbucks or any other national coffee chain. I happen to be a fan of Starbucks, but I do not visit it as often as many of my peers for several reasons.

The average bill at Starbucks is $4-7 plus a tip. You don't need a calculator to evaluate money (literally down the drain). The flavorings at Starbucks is very good, in fact excellent. The coffees themselves are a bit better than mediocre. This is because they do not buy their coffees in beans as some chains do and grind it themselves. Coffee gets stale fast unless in bean form. Okay, that's simpler and I do not blame them for it.

I can only speak for myself. Am I some kind of authority?

I know where to find the best coffees in the world, and I do, and package them in my own private labels. Does that make me an expert on coffees? Not quite. But I know a lot more now than I did before I started. And more importantly, I learned how to package them as useful, tasty, memorable corporate gifts. It was a powerful lesson.

As popular as Starbucks may be, I believe it was a big error to print provocative philosophical text on their cups. I do not want to talk about deep subjects first thing in the morning. My newspaper editor and probably yours too knows what we like best. We like to laugh. He/she has devoted an entire non revenue-producing page just for us called the comics page. The editor is fully-aware we are going to be reading some "pretty nasty stuff" before we wade through to the comics.

So why not offer simply comics and your name and URL with your coffee?

It was not rocket science, but I figured out how to do it.

Finally last September, I launched the world's first cartoon gourmet coffee gift basket (with whole fresh beans from 5 different countries, some flavored, some not). I included a set of four cartoon coasters, both the oversize cup and the coasters have the cartoon of the customer's choice. I put it on my website. I posted it at Shop.com, Amazon.com, Ebay.com, and a bunch of others. And guess what. I was right. People enjoy the coffee and laughter, not coffee and Emanuel Kant or coffee and today's crime du jour. And I toss in a gourmet biscotti for free.

So what does all this have to do with corporate gift-giving. I decided to not only discount the coffee gift boxes but offer engraving of one's company name and URL for only $2. Do I take a loss on that? Sure do. I make up for it with a decent markup, however. I am not becoming Bill Gates, but the marketing concepts works for some reason.

And the reason is psychological. Think about it. There are a million ways to advertise you and your business. But there is only one way to advertise your name and business to your client or potential client in which he/she, first thing in the morning, sees not only your name and URL, but a very funny cartoon that immediately puts them in a good mood. As time goes by, when they think of you or your company, they think positive thoughts.

Now I've added 22 other products utilizing my 8500 cartoon images and only charge $2 to imprint one's name and URL. It works like a dream. People always want to know from where that gift derived.