23 Jun 09 Target’s On-Target Umbrella Bags

This post is written by guest blogger Terence P Ward.

Target offered branded umbrella bags free to its wet customers.

Target offers branded umbrella bags free to its wet customers in Poughkeepsie, NY

While many retailers were no doubt lamenting New York’s monsoon season, Target found a way to capitalize on it by offering complimentary umbrella bags to its customers. This is a great example of how to keep a brand firmly in the hearts and minds of the people. This service has some nice benefits:

Thoughtful. Who wouldn’t appreciate the offer to keep a little drier while shopping?
Viral. No doubt those Target-branded umbrella bags were everywhere in the mall, gleefully trumpeting the bull’s-eye logo in every nook and cranny of the competition’s retail space. I wonder how many people went to Target because they wanted an umbrella bag too?
Clean. Even as the umbrella bags send forth armies of loyal Target shoppers into the mall, they’re keeping Target’s floors and merchandise cleaner. The cost of the bags is more than offset by not having to mop as often.

All in all, this is a really nice example of innovative marketing that adds value, creates goodwill, and spreads brand awareness for very little upfront investment. The best marketing ideas aren’t the ones that scream for attention; rather, they can’t help but get noticed because they add value all by themselves.

So is your marketing taking into consideration what your customers actually need, like Target’s is? What separates your promotional items from mere advertising, and elevates them to objects that provide value? Do you get caught up in the romance of promotional items when you look through those catalogs, the way I do? It really can be intoxicating, imagining the company logo on a letter opener, but when’s the last time you actually saw someone using a letter opener?

Like any other aspect of marketing, make sure you can track results with promotional items. For Target the result could be seen in the mall. For a law firm I once worked for, the tracking came in the form frequent requests for more of our post-it notes (they were in bright colors and stood out among the standard yellow ones). It only makes sense to promotional items with a high perceived value – even if the items themselves are as inexpensive as a plastic umbrella bag.