If you’re designing promotional products for marketing your brand, the last thing you want is to end up at a tradeshow with a boxful of custom t-shirts with your company name spelled wrong.
While you might be confident in your promotional product designs, you still might be susceptible to common promotional product design mistakes like these that compromise their effectiveness. Before you organize your next promotional product advertising campaign, check out our list of common design miscues so you can maximize your return on investment.
1. Not Considering the End Users
How to avoid: Study your audience before designing your product to ensure you create the kinds of products they would genuinely be interested in using.
The first (and maybe biggest) mistake many companies make when marketing promotional products is neglecting the motivations and desires of the real people they’re marketing to, viewing them purely as a market, not as individuals.
It can be all too easy to get so caught up in communicating your brand messaging that you overlook the desires of the actual people you’re advertising to. While you might want your promotional tote bag to present your entire USP, the people who would actually consider taking that swag are probably less interested in carrying around a bag displaying a massive block of sales copy.
Remember that the real goal is for these items to display your brand to the masses, not just to the individuals who take them. You’ll want to ensure these items are genuinely appealing — which may mean doing a little more due diligence than slapping your company logo on a custom hat and calling it a day. Consider unique designs that serve your brand positioning while giving users something that’s visually and stylistically compelling.
2. Selecting the Wrong Item for the Market
How to Avoid: Consider your audience’s interests and the context of the event before selecting a product.
Products that have practical use or align with recipients' interests are more likely to be appreciated, used, and — most importantly — displayed. Choosing a promotional product that doesn’t match the occasion, target audience, or industry can mean budget and a blown opportunity to show off your brand.
You might have your heart set on custom golf gear, but is your audience more of a basketball crowd? Or maybe you want to make an impression with custom technology products, but your audience has all the tech gear they need but really just want a humble pen.
It’s important to think through not only what your audience is interested in, but what your audience would be interested in taking with them and using or wearing. A promotional product doesn’t do much good if it’s sitting inside a drawer for years on end.
That means not just making sure the custom items you pick are relevant to your audience, but making sure that they’re genuinely useful to them. Ideally, you want your audience to do the legwork of using or wearing your promotional item regularly, displaying your brand messaging to the people in their network. That means ensuring that the items you pick would be at least theoretically exciting for your market — with or without your branding.
3. Overcomplicating Design
How to Avoid: Focus on one or two main visual elements, such as a logo or tagline. Use clear fonts, limit the color palette, and aim for a balanced design.
As is the case with most marketing endeavors, when designing promotional products, less is often more. Overloading a design with excessive details, intricate patterns, crowded layouts, or too much text can distract from the brand message. Promotional products should present your brand in a way that is instantly recognizable.
Remember, you want the person using the product to have a clear association with your brand every time they reach for it, but you also want the people they use that product around to see your logo as well.
4. Ignoring Product Quality
How to Avoid: Choose high-quality materials, even if it means spending a bit more. Consider testing samples before a full order to evaluate the product’s durability, feel, and functionality.
Remember, the quality of your promotional product reflects on your brand. Cheap or flimsy products may save money upfront, but they risk detracting from your brand's reputation. Poor-quality materials or products that break within a couple uses can be a bad look for your brand.
It’s also worth remembering that the longer a product lasts and the more it’s used, the more promotional equity you get for your investment. Once you’ve designed your product and paid for it, it’s in your best interest to ensure you get a long lifecycle from it so your logo and messaging can be displayed as widely as possible. The promotional value of a branded item that gets used once and breaks is much lower than it is for an item people use for years on end.
5. Not Enforcing Brand Consistency
How to Avoid: Stick to your brand style guide, using the same colors, fonts, and logos consistently across all promotional materials.
Brand consistency is key to building trust and recognition in your market. If you haven’t already, establishing a brand book or style guide as a single source of truth helps you reinforce your brand's identity, making it easier for customers to remember and notice you in future interactions. Once you have that in place, you can maximize the effectiveness of your exposure.
Promotional products that don’t accurately reflect your brand colors, logo, or message can confuse recipients and dilute the impact of your marketing efforts. Your brand identity should be immediately recognizable on any product, leaving no question as to what your branding should look like.
6. Poor Logo Placement or Visibility
How to Avoid: Test different placements to see what works best with the shape and layout of the product. Aim for a logo size and position that is visible but doesn’t dominate the entire design.
A well-placed logo will make your brand more recognizable without overwhelming the product, which is the whole point of promotional product advertising.
Logos that are too small can make the promotional effort essentially meaningless if no one can make it out. Meanwhile logos that are too big may be so distracting that recipients don’t want to use or wear the product at all. As for awkwardly placed logos, these can make your brand hard to distinguish or even detract from its credibility.
Remember that the idea behind a promotional product isn’t that it bombards people with your branding — or that it plays so coy with the branding that no one even recognizes it. Aim for tasteful-yet-visible logo placement. You want people to act
7. Not Prioritizing Functionality
How to Avoid: Put the values and experience of the end-user first — ask yourself, what kind of product would people realistically want to use?
If someone picks up your trade show giveaway and then leaves it in their tote bag for the rest of its lifespan, it doesn’t do your brand much good. Remember that a promotional item only works as long as it’s seen, which means the more it’s used, the better for your brand.
It’s also worth remembering that your product will reflect on your brand — if it doesn’t quite work, that’s a bad signal, but a quality product that gets genuine use for the long haul shows off your commitment to quality. Plus, your brand stays top of mind every time it’s used, so you want it to be functional enough for regular use.
While aesthetic appeal is important, a promotional product that looks good but isn’t functional may end up unused or discarded. A non-functional item misses the chance to reinforce brand presence with repeated use, which can in turn undermine your campaign when you’re marketing promotional products.
Create Your Custom Promotional Product Design Today
Now that you know what not to do when it comes to promotional product design, here are a few things you should do:
- Keep functionality, originality, or both top of mind to ensure recipients want to use or wear it.
- Consider how your item of choice will complement your design style, shape, and colors, and check out our logo placement guide before you lay it out.
- Cater your product to the type of event and the people who’ll be attending.
- When uploading your design, choose the best file type for your design.
- Always check printing timelines to ensure your product will arrive in time.
- Opt for high-quality materials from reputable printers like RushOrderTees.
Whether you’re looking to create custom trade show products, custom office supplies, or just about anything in between, RushOrderTees has you covered.
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About the Author
Based in New Mexico, Bryce Emley is a seasoned content writer and expert in the realms of custom apparel and eCommerce. Holding an MFA in Creative Writing, he seamlessly blends his passions, specializing in insightful content that bridges the gap between innovative apparel solutions and digital commerce trends. Beyond his professional pursuits, Bryce is an avid creator, channeling his creativity into poetry, screenplays, and creative nonfiction. In his leisure time, he has a penchant for collecting unique, vintage anime t-shirts, showcasing his love for both rare finds and the artistry of apparel design.
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