3 Top Tips for Going Green with Corporate Gifts

For a long time now corporate gifts have been a great way of showing customers and employees you appreciate them. These gifts can be exceptional at motivating employees and inspiring loyalty in customers.

With the recent heightened concern for the environment, receivers of such gifts are starting to insist on more environmentally friendly alternatives to the plastic giveaways of yesteryear. Below are 3 killer ways to make your corporate gifts more environmentally friendly:

1. Reduce Waste

You’ve got a marketing budget and corporate gifts are obviously a very important part of the spend. They create enormous good will and per dollar spent generate a fantastic amount of coverage. According to the Advertising Speciality Institute of America a reusable bag generates around 5700 impressions per bag! Given how successful they are as a marketing tool the key to being a superstar environmental marketer is to ensure minimal waste. There are a couple of great ways to do this:

1. Reduce the number of items you give away but increase the spend per item. Giving away one higher value/quality product will reduce the chance of the product being thrown in the bin while giving customers a better experience. Giving away lots of cheaper items is much more likely to fill a landfill than giving you the exposure you crave

2. Buy the right thing! Think carefully about what people want and need. If you give away a really useful product of nice quality it will be used. A useless cheap plastic product is more likely to add kilos to the landfill than $ to your bottom line!

2. Choose Reusable Products

The purpose of corporate gifts is to generate as many positive impressions as possible for your customers and employees. Luckily this fits in nicely with the reuse mantra of the environmental movement. Picking a reusable product that will ideally replace a disposable product gives you both a low cost per impression and helps the environment.

We were recently approached by the GM of the Kowloon Hash House Harriers (a popular local running club). He wanted to replace the disposable plastic water bottles with a reusable plastic bottle which the runners would refill at work and bring along to the run in the evening. This single move helped promote the club as everyone now runs with branded bottles, stopped one thousand three hundred plastic bottles going to landfill every year and saved the running club $6500 pa by no longer having to provide water.

3. Choose Recyclable products

The recyclability of products is tricky. Theoretically almost anything can be recycled but to improve your eco credentials here are a couple of things you can easily put into practice

1. Packaging – here today, gone tomorrow. Packaging is really important to create the right impression, pack a gift nicely and the perceived value goes through the roof. But given its short life, picking an easy to recycle packaging option will help you nail the eco in your gift. Ditch the poly bags and plastic laminated paper in favour of natural kraft paper boxes with a high recycled content and, if the product really needs individual wrapping use a tissue paper instead of a polybag.

2. Eco materials – If you really want to go all out eco you can select a totally natural material such as wood or bamboo for the actual gift. The range of eco material products is growing daily

As popular opinion moves towards more sustainable, ecological marketing we need to ensure we meet both of these aims. Hopefully some of the above will help!