One of the effects of the economic crisis has been the growth in popularity of pens as a promotional product. The recent research by PPAI has revealed that pens top the list of promotional products with the greatest advertiser/message recall due to usefulness or uniqueness:

The relatively low cost and the usefulness of the product itself make the pens the promotional product of choice especially when budget is the most important consideration. No wonder that many promotional products suppliers see the return of the pens to the top of their best seller list.

Looks like it is back to basics, back to pens …

Photo: promogifts

The green fever spreads in our industry. Here is one product marketed as green – the water calculator. Well I am not sure if I would call it green. It does not use any recycled material, it is not even packed in a box made of recycled paper. The only thing that can be considered green is the fact that it does not have to use a battery. How is this going to save the environment .

But while I think the “green product” label attached to this product is just a misleading marketing trick it still is a fun item. Kind of cool promotional product for a drink company.

You run promo for soda – print “Runs on Soda” on the box, you run promo for coffee – print “Runs on Coffee” on the box, you run promo for water – print “Runs on Water” on the box.

The best product to promote with this calculator would however be some energy drink

I was doing small research on evolution of some big brand logos. OK, not really a research. I needed to see how some big guys polish and revive their brands so I spent about 15 minutes on Google and looked around. I found this article on the Starbucks logo. I had no idea they recently started to use some retro logo design. Over here all we get is still the “classic” green one. But after reading the article I thought this is exactly what I was looking for – some example of return to the roots. And I thought this is quite well done.

The article I mentioned says that the marketing objective in bringing back this version of the original logo was to compliment the campaign slogan “Roasting coffee since 1971. The best cup then. The best cup now”. I think the logo does it nicely. It also gives a different feeling to the Starbucks merchandise – including the mugs.

But then I checked few other links pointing to the new Starbucks logo articles and I realized that some people actually have some issues with it. Serious issues. The problem seems to be the way the siren (mermaid) in the logo is pictured – “naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute”.

Here is one nice article on this. I am quite sure that making people calling them “Slutbucks” was not the idea behind the old logo revival . But it got people talking and gave the retro image quite some publicity. At the end the very people who find the the logo slutty are doing the new old logo the best service. Marketing by controversy in its best .

Time for some coffee . Slutbucks perhaps .

Merchandising is a serious money maker for popular sport teams (and not only for them). The merchandise itself is not always perfect and almost always overpriced. But it is nice to see when the overpriced stuff is actually designed well and truly represents the feel of the brand and the team. Here is one example – The Vodafone McLaren Mercedes coffee tumbler.

I am not a favourite of the bright reflex colours but as their sponsors pay for that it is part of the image of the car as is the mirror silver metal finish:

The cup has been branded by 3D PVC badge. This is the same technology used for all those cartoon keychains or zipper pullers on garments or bags. Once the PVC sleeve is molded it is simply fixed on the common stainless steel tumbler and the product is almost ready. Well almost. At this stage it only represents the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 racing team. They clearly wanted to incorporate the McLaren group logo into the design too.

Here is the logo:

And here is how the logo appears on the product without disturbing the overall design:

I love the thinking behind this simple design, the attention to details. At the same time I hate the thinking behind pricing this product .