Not one of the best BizGift ideas - Three Nuts from KPMG

When you are thinking what BizGift to use in your campaign you need to think about the audience you are trying to reach. Once you identify your audience then you design a promotional product or business gift that matches the target of your campaign. When you are thinking about business gift proper (something you give as an expression of “Thank You” to your business partners) you should think whether the gift will be appreciated by the recipient. Here is one example of business gift that did not hit the target …

End of the year, the time before Christmas, is usually the peak business gifts giving season. Many companies are choosing BizGift with some Christmas theme or gifts that evoke the Christmas atmosphere. There are several countries in Europe where watching the 35 years old Czech movie Three Nuts For Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) has been part of the Christmas experience for years. According to Wikipedia it became “a holiday classic in many European countries. It is shown on TV around Christmas time every year in the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Norway”. I will not name the country here, but it was in one of the above where KPMG took a theme from this movie as an idea for their business gift.

The theme - Cinderella gets 3 hazelnuts and each of the hazelnuts grants her one wish. KPMG decided to use the 3 nuts as a corporate gift.

One thing I can tell when looking the product, even when it does not look like that, it probably was not cheap to make. It was handmade in Europe and there was sure quite a bit of manpower necessary to produce this. Also to the credit of whoever produced this product, it was made in a protected workshop (a place providing jobs to disabled people).

The problem is, the end result is very cheap looking product. The huge waste-of-paper box is pretty much empty. And visibly empty thanks to the large size clear window. The string that suspends the walnuts in the box is way too long. As a result, instead of nicely hanging there the three walnuts lie down at the bottom of the box, lonely as a Cinderella …

When I saw this first I thought there must be something more to this. Perhaps the nuts are fake and there is something hidden inside. So I cracked one of the walnuts open … Well, no surprise, the walnut was real, although not edible

The authors did not even pay enough attention to detail, and used walnuts instead of hazelnuts … Perhaps they should have used the hazelnuts. They are much smaller, they could have placed them in a smaller cuter box and use it as a sort of a gimmick along with a proper business gift. Well they did not …

They used this paper box with 3 nuts lying at the bottom as their business gift proper. I am not sure what was the thinking behind this but I saw the reaction of one of the recipients, not an unimportant KPMG client. Shaking head and wondering: “What is this ?” I took the box from him and asked few other people what they think about this. Maybe I asked wrong people, but I did not find a single one thinking this nutbox was a good idea for a gift from company like KPMG.

In the worst case, a wrong choice of corporate gifts may offend the recipient - usually a business partner or prospective client. Unless you have some hidden agenda, offending your business partners and clients is the last thing you want to achieve by spending your money on business gifts.

It may not be a bad idea to test your ideas on few people you know first …

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