Corporate Gifts - An Innovation for Promoting Business

In the mix of marketing communication corporate gifts hold the position of a significant tool. Anything can be such a gift ranging from stationary goods to one all-inclusive holiday for 2 to the Caribbeans. With the increasing awareness of companies regarding the crucial necessity of developing as well as retaining long-term relationships with clients corporate gifts have motivated the business community to build healthy relationships with customers of importance. They also catalyze the reinforcement of advertising preceding sales promotion. They are the strengthening ground of goodwill creation and effective corporate relationships. The potential and existing customers primarily receive these incentives and gifts. In this regard the need of using such gifts rests with the principal decision making of the marketing managers.

Corporate Gifts featuring the company logo is the preference with the majority of the companies. Desk items have evolved to be the trendiest gifts in this respect although crystal and china were the widely popular gifts of the past. This change has paved the way for giving the concept of corporate hospitality a strong foothold to flourish popularly in future.

Engendering goodwill and promoting corporate image are the two main objectives as far as the utility of Corporate Gifts are concerned. The companies speculate that business gift expenditure would remain same in future as it is their belief that such gifts has always been successful in achieving the objectives they desire. The companies mostly purchase an assortment of gifts of different denominations to suit their various needs. As regards the price of gifts, a whole lot of companies pay such an offering from their budget of marketing while some pay from budgets concerning special promotion. The companies rely on the period of Christmas-New Year as the most suitable time for using gifts through launching a new-fangled service.

Research illustrates the pivotal role played by commercial gifts in the intermingling of marketing and communication. It is believed by the companies that their strategy of selling communication can be aided by these gifts to a considerable extent. Thus it is required by the companies using such gifts to coordinate their use with other marketing-communication mix tools with a clearly defined objective behind their use for their ethical, creative and targeted accountability. This is because the precious key to successful utilization of gifts lies in building surety in associating value totaling with their enhancement of corporate image reflection via service offering heading towards the creation of goodwill.

Nevertheless the future responsibility regarding the betterment of Corporate Gifts as a business promotional tool stands on the behavior of gift giving meted out by various companies. The gifts have a long long way to go to transform them to be the centre for developing as well as maintaining long lasting business relationship with customers, employees along with other stakeholders, from its establishment solely as a tactical tool for marketing communication mix-up. Therefore to achieve that goal it necessitates future research to analyze the effectiveness of the gifts from the perspectives of their recipients, as very little academically published research has been conducted in this specific realm.