Accidental Hero - Lanyard with a Card

About a year ago we had a booth at a large trade show. The weeks before the show were quite busy for us and the exhibition preparations did suffer a bit. At the end we did manage to arrange nice booth set up but we overlooked one thing. Yes, you can guess, we overlooked our own give away goodies for the visitors . We still had left few hundred lanyards we used to give out in the past, but I was not too keen to use them again. We have used them for several shows already and I was becoming bored with them. But as there was nothing else, we had to do with them yet again.

Although we overlooked our tiny little gifts for the visitors, we did prepare quite nice and expensive catalog with our new product line. While the catalogs are printed to be distributed, I do hate when people who will never even look inside them collect them from the booth, just for the sake of collecting them. Waste of paper and money down the drain. Moreover, the catalogs run out pretty fast that way and by the end of the show there are none for the people who are genuinely interested. This happens no matter how many catalogs you bring to the show.

So, on one side we had lanyards as a giveaway we did not really find exciting any more, on the other side a pile of catalogs we wanted to distribute without wasting them. And then the idea came…

We took one of the photos from the catalog (not showing the products themselves, but a colorful and attractive photo) and the theme from the catalog cover. We designed a sort of a name card with the photo and our contact info and the website on one side, the catalog cover theme on the other. We had few hundred of these printed in a 12 hour print shop with a hole punched through at the top of the card.

In the booth we attached the cards to our old lanyards and placed them on a display where they were kind of screaming “Take Me !”. And people were taking them like crazy … The colorful design of the card proved to be very attractive and was actually drawing people into our booth. I could not believe it . Moreover, we could afford to display only one or two of our catalogs as a browsing copies. To our old customers or very serious visitors we gave the catalogs, most of the walk in buyers were happy just to take the contact info on the lanyard with card. Those who were serious enough and contacted us after the show received the catalogs by mail.

This is how a small colourful card turned a leftover giveaway into accidental hero

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