Notes on corporate gifting, appreciation, and the moments that make business relationships stick.
Every year, someone calls us with a fantastic gifting idea. There is just one problem. They need 800 of them. Next Tuesday. Sometimes we can pull off miracles. But gifting gets much easier when there is a little runway, and the difference between a stressful December and an effortless one is almost entirely about the…
One of the hardest things about buying gifts for customers or employees is that you rarely get to see what happens after the box arrives. That is why recipient feedback is so valuable. Here is the kind of note every gifting program hopes to generate: The kind of thing we aim for is, “This was…
Most companies spend a lot of money trying to get the attention of people who have never done business with them. Advertising. Outbound sales. Events. Lead generation. All important. But there is another audience sitting right in front of you: the customers who already chose you. They already know your name. They already understand what…
Sometimes companies hesitate to send gifts because they assume a meaningful gesture has to be expensive. It does not. Recognition works because of what it says, not because of the receipt attached to it. A smaller gift sent at exactly the right moment can be far more powerful than an expensive gift sent out of…
December gets most of the attention in corporate gifting, and for good reason. But sometimes the most memorable thank-you is the one nobody is expecting. A project wrapped up successfully in March? That can be a gifting moment. A client hit an important milestone? A gifting moment. An employee went far beyond what was expected?…
There is an interesting challenge with corporate gifting. You might be sending 50 gifts. Or 500. Or 5,000. But the person opening the box only receives one. To them, it is personal. That is why the best large-scale gifting programs do not feel large-scale. The recipient should not be thinking about spreadsheets, shipping lists, purchase…
Most gifts have a very short window to make an impression. The box arrives. The recipient sees who it is from. They open it. And within about ten seconds, they have decided how they feel about it. Generic. Useful. Unexpected. Thoughtful. Forgettable. One of those. That is why the first impression matters so much. The…
A corporate gift is rarely just about the gift. It is really about the moment when someone opens it. Do they think, “Oh, that was nice”? Or do they stop for a second and think, “Wow. They actually put some thought into this”? That difference matters. Because the best gifts are not necessarily the most…
Picking the gift is the fun part. Getting hundreds of gifts to hundreds of people? That is where things get interesting. Bad addresses. Apartment numbers. Remote employees. People who moved. International addresses. Weather. Delivery exceptions. Someone who entered their office address even though they work from home. And, inevitably, “mine never arrived.” None of this…
Here is something we have learned about corporate gifts: price and impact are not necessarily related. You can spend $200 on something that gets opened, politely appreciated, and forgotten by Friday. Or you can spend substantially less on something that gets photographed, passed around the office, and talked about for months. The difference usually comes…