Increasingly, athletes at all levels are choosing running caps and beanie hats to contribute to their sporting success. The old adage that a vast amount of body heat is lost through the head has been proven to be a myth, but even so, good hats really make a difference to sporting safety and performance, and they are very fashionable: Cheryl Cole wore one when she landed in the UK this week and Gryffindor beanie hats are one of the top selling Halloween costumes in the UK this year.
If you want to find a good way to publicise a business, event or person, then quality caps or hats are ideal. Sportspeople know that headgear protects them from the sun, conserve warmth in colder times and may even add a reflective safety element at night through high visibility fabrics or flashings.
When choosing the hat or cap to feature your design remember that knit hats have a more porous quality giving better wicking and breathability while woven hats are less breathable and have less wicking but offer better sun protection. Anglers and sailors like a brim to help avoid low winter sun, while runners like hats that they can crumple up and carry in the hand if they get too hot. Winter athletes need close-fitting hats that don’t fall off when they perform stunts or move at hight speeds – take advice from your clothing provider to ensure your hat will do what you want it to.
Ensure your logo or wording has high contrast to the material of the hat. Athletes move fast so observers need to be able to spot the promotional message easily. If you can run the image or wording right round the hat or on both front and back, you get double the chance of it appearing in photographs of sporting events, which means twice the opportunity to promote yourself.
There are many effective ways to promote a business or market a commodity: bands have T-shirts, pizza outlets give away mouse mats and computer companies give away memory sticks. Accountants send their clients calendars with the key financial dates listed and charities make sure that donors remember annual fundraising events by sending them reminder cards they can send on to their friends for major festivals. It all serves two purposes: retaining current business and attracting new business. Couldn’t be simpler, could it?
So why do so many businesses fail to see any return on their promotional activity?
Lack of creativity, lack of market research and corner-cutting are the three main reasons.
Repeating the same actions over and over generates less return each time, so smart companies find ways to renew their brand recognition by, for example, swapping their annual desktop blotters given away to clients in December for barbecue aprons sent out in July: this refreshes everybody’s view of the company and brings a whole new audience to the promotional clothing – everybody who goes to that client’s barbecue is likely to get the message printed on his or her new barbecue gear.
Market research shows how clients are changing – if 40% of your target market is now women and you’re still sending out traditionally masculine promotional items like baseball caps, it may be time to invest in more gender neutral merchandise like tote bags which convey the same information but appeal much more to women.
Corner-cutting is always tempting but T-shirts that fade and shrink after one washing don’t carry a great message, mainly because they never get worn again! Paying the right amount for the right promotional material is a long term investment and should be explored with a professional promotional clothing provider who can advise a company on how to get the most for their budget.
But not in a good way. According to GQ Magazine, Atlanta is America’s 17th worst-dressed city, where ‘everyone is a CEO or founder of a record label or a clothing line you’d have never heard of if it weren’t plastered in size 96 Helvetica font on their chest’ – ouch!
So what makes good promotional clothing?
Test it
Keep early print runs small, so the expense is manageable and storage isn’t a problem. Once you know there is demand, you can go for more garments but at first, 100 T-shirts may be all you can shift effectively.
Work up
Don’t invest in a half-hearted venture with somebody from the local art college and the printer down the road who’s been screen-printing T-shirts for bands for the past thirty years – find professionals to design your artwork and print your clothing or you’ll end up with ugly, ill-designed, unpopular promotional items that you can’t even persuade your best friend to wear in public.
Be free
Start by giving away good but cost-effective promotional gear like caps, later you can sell niche items through retail outlets: T-shirts are popular but embroidered gifts for events and festivals, or season specific garments like winter gloves, summer vests and other apparel can become collectors’ items.
Get passionate
If you are your own target market, think like yourself! If you like what you offer, so will potential investors/buyers/service users, but if you end up with promotional clothing that you wouldn’t wear yourself, you’ve short-changed yourself, your business and your potential customers.
We all know that any promotion has a short shelf-life, even if the best publicity material becomes art, like the tin Coca-Cola signs that now sell for a fortune and hang in trendy loft apartments. So how can you get more for your promotional budget by moving your cost-effective promotional clothing into the realm of art?
Consider the example set by 36-year-old Khageswar Mallick from Jaipur, India. He’s a craftsman who takes old T-shirts and converts them into embroidered art with such skill that his recycled clothing craftwork has become collectable. He’s been recycling textiles for a decade and is now training thirty women in his district to do similar work, so that a textile art form can be established in the region.
For a business, this is an easy way to get good publicity. Invite people who own your promotional material to re-purpose it as bags or baby-slings, hammocks, pot-plant holders … whatever their ingenuity suggests to them. Feature a monthly winner on facebook, your blog and website and give them a suitable and imaginative prize. Your clothing could become cult material, and you could identify future ways to promote your product, band or service by seeing what resourceful individuals do with your promotional gear.
The UK, in the past 17 years, has become a hothouse of festivals: music events such as Glastonbury, Rockness and the Isle of Wight festival and food festivals like Chilli Fest or The Big Cheese or Fishstock.
Now the nicer weather has apparently settled in, it’s a great time to work out how your company or organisation can benefit from the festival season.
Promotional clothing is a great way to harness the feel-good factor and you don’t just have to give out T-shirts and hope for the best: many companies and brands have had fantastic success in getting their T-shirts or other promotional clothing to travel and appear in the media by offering prizes or incentives for photographs of a branded hat or polo-shirt being worn in some outlandish or surprising location. And then there is the potential to piggyback on other weird promotional activities such as the Travelling Gnome phenomenon which appears in the film Amelia.
You can find festivals here that might suit giving away branded goodies, and even if you can’t create a world-wide trend with your promotional clothing, it’s still certain that comfortable summer garments with your logo or slogan on them will be a travelling advertisement for your organisation.
This month an online shopfront with a difference has opened – it’s for Pope Benedict XVI’s September trip to the UK and offers a series of mementoes: an embroidered baseball cap like the one the Pope has been seen wearing himself this summer, keyrings and fridge magnets and a range of T-shirts including one that can be personalised to include the name of the individual’s local church.
Several commentators have remarked on how similar the highly detailed printed T-shirts are to heavy metal designs and colour schemes it’s hoped they will appeal to a wide range of ‘pilgrims’ to help cover the £7 million cost of the visit.
The church is not alone in merchandising for the trip: the National Secular Society also has an online presence offering T-shirts with the slogan ‘Pope Nope’.
If your business is merchandising for an event or promotion, try thinking about how you offer your merchandise – you can use the angle of local identity, perhaps by promoting your locality, alongside your business, offering T-shirts with maps to local parks but including your shop.
Try point of sale branding if you have a physical location too, such as on sunny days giving away a baseball cap with your telephone number on it, or a rain hat or umbrella on rainy days. You can even offer a random prize for people buying in your shop or ringing up, every sixtieth customer, or whatever, can be sent a promotional T-shirt with their order, and you can give unrecognisable information about each winner (eg their first name and initial of surname, to keep within data protection rules) on your website.
The most recent example of ambush marketing was insanely successful in getting attention, although the cost may turn out to be too high.
Three dozen pretty women wearing bright orange mini-dresses stole the show during the World Cup. Every camera, including the TV ones, was focused on them, right up until the moment that they were kicked out of the stadium. They’d been hired by a brewery (Bavaria) to promote the company during the football match. Now two of the women and the brewery are facing charges “organising unlawful commercial activities”. And it wasn’t just the pretty women, Robbie Earle was in the stadium as an ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid but he was dropped as a TV commentator and ambassador because the orange lovelies got into the match using tickets he was given for distribution to his family and friends.
Why all the fuss? Because Budweiser paid millions to have exclusive beer representation during the competition.
Sponsorship is big business and ambush marketing tries to achieve the same level of coverage for almost no expenditure. The little orange dresses had only a tiny brand marker, but every Dutch person had already seen the exact same dress being worn by the wife of Rafeal van der Vaart – one of Holland’s best players.
And it’s a dirty business – Linford Christie once wore contact lenses with a cut-out of a puma on them to a press conference, because his status as an Olympian forbade him promoting his sportswear sponsor at Olympic events. And Michael Jordan actually covered up his Reeboks vest when Nike sponsored not the US basketball team, but just the team’s news conferences!
So if you can get away with using some kind of promotional clothing to launch an ambush marketing caper around a sporting event, you might decide it’s worth a try, but don’t mix it with the Olympics! The Olympic committee are notorious for aggressively defending their logo and even words associated with the Olympics, and fines for breaking their rules are substantial – up to £20,000 for each offence.
Caps in winter are a valuable tool for business promotion and staff well-being! Not only do they help keep your staff safe and well by conserving body heat and protecting the vision from wind, rain and snow, they also serve as a great promotional item.
