Recently I heard an advertisement industry speaker refer to the masses of promotional products salesmen as “anyone with a trench coat and a trunk” and that really resonated with me. It wasn’t just because of the imagery and the connotations, but more so the bigger picture it painted. This perfectly reflected the stigma that many promotional product peddlers are essentially just walking flea markets. They show up with thick catalogs and tons of samples ready to show you the wide spectrum of products they can offer. After all, with so many options their prospects are bound to like something, right?
The irony is that this stigma is the antithesis of what Blezoo is about. We are more concerned about asking, listening, engaging, thinking and then formulating a campaign for our clients. We want to talk about branding, target marketing, benchmarking, return on investment, viral marketing and all of these qualitative and quantitative metrics that might seem foreign to the peddler with the trench coat (who is more concerned with bombarding you with tons of irrelevant products).
A byproduct of this recession has been the demise of a lot of the trench coats, but they are sure to continue to propagate as soon as marketing budgets open up again. We’ve also noticed a lot of businesses adding promotional products into their repertoire as an additional form of revenue further saturating the market. Are they really any different than order takers if they can’t add value to the client’s marketing approach?
In this crowded field of competitors wielding shotguns, Blezoo will continue to take a sniper approach to business. We are marketing executives, not sales peddlers, and we speak marketing every day. Our focus is on promotional products and helping our clients grow their businesses. Oh, and by the way, we don’t even like wearing trench coats.
