Episode 90: Responding to Fast Company's "Cheap Swag" Article

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Fast Company published an article that thundered across the promotional products community titled "It's Time to Stop Spending Billions on Cheap Conference Swag," written by Elizabeth Segran. The opinion was met with much approval by many on social, and it evoked frustration, some anger, and even agreement among those in the promotional products business. We wrote a response titled "Here's the Thing About That Piece on Swag by Elizabeth Segran and Fast Company: She's Right." And our article was mentioned by Elizabeth on Twitter who said it was, and I quote, "A genuinely thoughtful response to my swag story." I want to thank Elizabeth for her feedback. And you can read our article at community.commonsq.com. Hi friends, my name is Bobby LeHew. I'm the Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. And today we explore this article and the potential ramifications, but moreover, the opportunity this moment presents for many in the business. I'm joined on this episode by Mark Graham, Commonsku's co-founder and Chief Platform Officer,, as well as our good friend and eclectic entrepreneur Winston Low, president of Creative Boulevard, an imaginative distributor who excels at fashion-forward merchandising for today's modern buyer. This episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. 2019 is your year.

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Begin your free trial now at commenscue.com. And now to my conversation with Mark and Winston.

The industry's kind of up in arms about this Fast Company article by Elizabeth Segran entitled It's Time to Stop Spending Billions on Cheap Conference Swag. And in the article, Elizabeth talks about the ubiquitous use of swag and just goes down a litany of problems with the impact on the environment, how people are buying and selling cheap promotional merchandise that ends up in landfills. And it kind of ruffled some feathers, to say the least. Mark, what did you think when you first read this article?

At first, I think that you get this feeling like, wow, Fast Company has written about our industry, and you kind of get that tingly feeling. Because I think we're an industry that has, to some extent, has this inferiority complex, which I think should really go away. But when you get the mainstream press, particularly when it's a great media publication like Fast Company, writing about your industry, you think like, wow, this is great. When I actually then looked at the title and I read it, I was like, wow, this may be not so good. My immediate reaction was, how does one respond constructively and in a non-defensive way to this? Because I know that's how the association's going to respond, and much to their credit, they did in that way where they're going to be refuting a lot of the facts and pointing to all the great things the promotional products industry does. But I think I was trying to take a bit of a different angle, which was really looking at the article to see what she had right. I concluded that she's right about a couple of things. I think she's wrong about more things than she's right, but I think that in responding in a way that's constructive, I think it's important to look at it in a way without emotion to try to look at the ways that we can improve as an industry. So that was really my mindset. We can get into some more details later, but I think at the end of the day, it was, I think, written as a bit of a wake-up call to a certain segment of the industry that seems to capture the lion's share of the public's imagination about our business. And I think that's the thing that we should really look to try and change. Winston, what was your first impression?

My first impression was pretty similar to Mark's. I have high respect for the magazine Fast Company. I subscribe to it. The title, "It's Time to Stop Spending Billions on Cheap Conference Swag." The takeaway that I had was that she probably went to many conferences that had inexpensive or cheap conference swag or things that doesn't really tie into the theme. Or, you know, the context of the conference. And I often feel that a lot of conference organizers, or some conference organizers, you know, look at promotional swag and giveaway as a last-minute thing. So, you know, they, they don't put a lot of thoughts into it. They just think that we have a little bit of extra budget, or we have a budget, you know, let's just do as much as we can and impress the heck out of these clients or these attendees without really thinking you know, what message that they can give or provide to the audience or the attendees, and, you know, how a promotional product can talk about that.

It's not only sold wrong in some cases, but it's also bought incorrectly in some cases. She pointed that out too. She started out the article— for those that haven't seen the article yet, we'll read a few excerpts from it— and it starts this way: Don't get me wrong, I love a good tote bag, particularly if it's from a brand I love. I have an NPR tote I got from a pledge drive. I confess that I canceled and resubscribed to The New Yorker just so that I could get a new version of the tote that comes with membership. Now, that's a very positive intro. Now, the rest of the article is tearing down the industry, and as we kind of all agree, and in many ways she was right. She goes on about drowning— and quoting here— drowning in dozens of other totes that brands fling at me at conferences, product launches, and events. Most of them aren't particularly sturdy or well-designed. They're not useful. She talks about the full-on environmental crisis. Also, she she does a decent job of researching the industry. She did some really good homework on the categories that totes make up in the $24 billion industry. She cites the number of distributors and businesses and people that are employed and came up with some pretty good figures, I thought. And so in many ways, she was right. We have an article, by the way, that complements this podcast episode that actually talks about the things that she got right in this article. A few other comments: she did her homework, she was right about the impact of landfill on the environment, she's right that many products are not well designed, and she was right about clients and companies buying these are looking to get them out to as many people as possible while maximizing their marketing budget. And Mark, I know one of your first responses was, she's right.

I think that she is right to some extent, as I said at the beginning, but I think where she's wrong is that she's missing the part of the business that brought her that New Yorker or NPR tote bag. What's interesting about that comment, she loves the New Yorker, NPR. Those are brands that she connects with because of what they stand stand for in her life. And so as a result, products that have been produced by those organizations, chances are those products are going to be loved by her because she already likes those brands. So think about brands that you admire. Each of us right now, brands that we interact with each and every day, if we had received a product that had a logo with one of the brands that we really admire, chances are we would think it's amazing unless there was some major disconnect there. She references The New Yorker, she references NPR, but then references these other companies that are flinging totes at her. Well, we don't know who those companies are. Chances are they're companies that she doesn't have a relationship with. Chances are they're companies that she doesn't know about. Chances are they're companies that she views as being inferior brands or ones that just don't connect with her. So if we were interviewing her on this podcast, I wonder whether that's something she would get into, because I really think there's a connection between a brand you admire and the product that you receive. So that was one main thing that I really thought about. Now, The New Yorker, it's a high-minded, urbane, sophisticated brand that attracts a kind of person, a certain kind of tribe, shall we say. Chances are, the person who's ordering merchandise for them is not going to give out a cheap plastic Frisbee with The New Yorker logo on it. I mean, if they did, whoever the distributor was that's advising them, I suspect they should find a new distributor because that doesn't really fit the right je ne sais quoi of New Yorker. And so as I was saying at the beginning, I think that she really leads with the most important part of this article, which is talking about the admiration she has for the products, for brands that she connects with. And I think that that's the thing that I get very excited about, and I wish that she had spent a little bit more time, maybe balanced the article a little bit more, exploring the relationship that she has with brands that she admires and the products that she gets from them, because I don't think that she would have been so damning about it.

You know, the product has to match the theme, you know, of what a company is trying to do. Mark, you've mentioned, you know, a cheap frisbee and whatnot. You know, there obviously there are times and places, you know, where a cheap frisbee makes sense. You know, for someone like New Yorker, maybe they have an event which is very outdoorsy and, you know, where a frisbee might make sense, you know, where there's a big field for people to interact, you know, with a frisbee and New Yorker on it. So I think It's not that we're trying to say that cheap products doesn't serve a purpose, you know, in our industry. And, you know, there are many suppliers that sells, you know, more commoditized products, but, you know, if it's just a little bit better thought out, and in this article, you know, they didn't talk about that. She didn't mention whether or not the NPR or the New Yorker tote bag is actually any good. She is a fan of New Yorker and NPR and she will associate that tote bag as being good, but it might be just as good as the ones that she didn't like if she didn't have a relationship with that company.

What a great point.

Yeah, I have a, I have a Powell's Book tote bag hanging in the corner in my study here, and I just, I have an emotional connection, right? Portland's famous Powell's Books. I have an emotional connection to that piece. You guys have pieces around you. Mark, you bought a t-shirt at Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. Of course, you do this with swag all the time. I was with Mark one time and he bought a t-shirt for a public library because he loves his public library. To me, what's interesting about this article is I kind of refuse to get defensive, and perhaps that's because I'm on the inside and I've seen this work so well. And frankly, I couldn't get past the glee of this tote bag story. I mean, according to Digiday, The New Yorker's total paid circulation rose 12.3% last year at 1.2 million, and over half a million people received that bag. Now, this is in the article we wrote But the Dwayne Shepherd, the VP of consumer marketing for The New Yorker, commented on how ubiquitous this bag is. He says, and I quote, "I've been traveling a lot personally, and my new game is how long will it be before I see a tote bag? In Berlin, it was day 3. In Dublin, it was 24 hours. No matter where I go, I tend to see at least one." The article, in a way, unravels when you get back to the purpose-driven aspect of this business. Because when you look at it as a whole, and you consider Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap, It's pretty easy to pick on when you look at the whole, but when we get down into the specifics, that's where the argument sort of tends to unravel. Or of course you can augment the argument with plenty of bad purchasing that's going on, but you can equally contrast that with some very smart purchasing.

Yeah, I mean, that's such a funny point, this whole idea of half a million bags and how that's in part contributed to the growth of the subscription for The New Yorker. I mean, it's just an incredible advertising opportunity. Let's also go back to that example around Turkey and the Wolf. Okay. So, I'd actually reference this story at the beginning of Skew Camp. So, the Turkey and the Wolf, for those people that don't know it, is this quirky little diner in New Orleans, great food. I think it was like the best restaurant or voted best restaurant in some fancy publication, which is why we went there. We wanted to go check out what all the fuss was, but it was just a great place. I just loved the vibe, the people that were there, and the food was really eclectic and great. I bought this shirt. So, it's a Gildan 2000 athletic gray shirt, one-color print, cool logo on it, and I paid $22 for it. And of course, we in the industry could have made that shirt for a fraction of the price, but I just thought it was cool. And for me, it was $22 well spent. And I've since worn it since Skucamp. That was what, a month ago? I've since worn that shirt probably 7 times. Okay. So, had I gone to a conference and someone had been standing at the registration table and it was at some bland conference that I was attending and I was given a size extra large in the Gildan 2000 athletic gray with a lame conference logo on it in a size that's 2 sizes too large for me, I can tell you that I would have written this same article saying, "What a waste of money. This swag is trash. They didn't get my size right. I felt that I wasn't honored as an attendee. This logo was awful." Like, who do they think they're kidding with this stuff? This is garbage. And the same problem. So to me, the promotional products business is totally contextual. It's like, do you understand your audience? Are you catering to your audience? Are you surprising and delighting them in all the different ways that you can hand out promotional merchandise and design it? And I think when you nail it, just like NPR and The New Yorker did with their tote bags, probably those tote bags are not that exciting really. At the end of the day, what's exciting about it is the context. I think that's really where the magic is. I wish that she had honored that part of it in a way that I think did more justice to the industry because what ends up happening, despite the fact that there's components where I think she's right, it ends up being a piece of journalism that is not as balanced as one might expect from a publication like Fast Company. That was the part that got me a little defensive, but I was also like, hey, how can we look at it from all sides.

A couple of the other things that she got wrong— she said they're all competing with one another to sell products at rock bottom prices, and I wrote that it's simply not true, but you would have to be inside the industry really to understand that. She didn't uncover that there are a host of contrarians in this business who are driving a revolution around sustainability, around effective promotions like Fair Wear, John Borg with Eco Imprints, and then people who are doing brilliant design like Brand Aid, 12NYC, Juice Marketing, Access— we can go on and on. I mean, the industry is full of these fantastic companies who are doing fantastic work for clients. You know, Mark, one of the thoughts that I had when I read it was I would use this piece in my client presentations. I would actually use it as an intro into bad swag and then get into the campaigns we've built for customers and show them how we are different and that we are going to build something that matters. It actually kind of stoked me. I was like, I would totally fucking use this article in a good client presentation.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, right? I was, I was reflecting on this earlier with, with some colleagues at Right Sleeve when we were talking about this article, and I said like, What do you think you're going to do about this when your customers come to you and reference this article? And I think at the end of the day, if you're a marketing manager, you need the right guidance from the right partner to help you really put together something that's going to make an impact. We talked about at the very beginning of this that buyers to some extent are culpable in this because they leave it to the last moment. They're not prepared to think about promotional products in the same light that they may other media that they invest in. This is some end users, certainly not all of them. They leave it to the last minute. They have some small little leftover budget that they have. And so at the end of the day, what they're coming to a distributor with is often a very confined spec where the distributor in some cases doesn't have a lot of room to move. They're just trying to get something out to the end client. So there's no question that there's a responsibility on both parts, but I think that educating the marketing manager so that way that when they're spending $1,000, $10,000, $50,000 on a promotional campaign, that they're not throwing that money out, that they're not going to be the subject of another Fast Company article that says that promotional products are a big waste of time. It's almost like the marketing manager wants to make sure that the products they're handing out have a real impact. I mean, what better time than now for us as an industry to get that wake-up call? I mean, we're getting interest from outside the four walls of this industry. This isn't PPAI, this isn't ASI that's writing about this, which is a little bit of an echo chamber. This is a mainstream publication that's speaking to more non-industry people than industry people, and it behooves us to respond in a way that's not defensive, but let's respond in a way that knocks their socks off with great creative merchandise that completely turns the perception of this industry around. I think it's a call to arms.

I do too. And I also think that distributors should be very proactive with this because what can happen is this article can kind of make its way through the rank and file of client buyers and they may not talk to you about this article. They may just kind of read it and bury this in their mind and decide they're going to appropriate some budget elsewhere. They could carve away some of that budget. So we should be very proactive with this article. And if it were me, as if I were a distributor again, I would actually be talking to my customers about this and I would go through— you can find the links on our blog. Where we, where we link to just some of the suppliers and the Quality Certification Alliance and things that are being done in the industry that completely are counter to what the article suggests, but also get into how to buy right, how to actually make effective promotions and make it matter. Like I said, I think it's a great opportunity to have a really good conversation with your client.

Yeah, you definitely want to continue to, you know, use this article as an anchor point and And it's a great opportunity to educate your clients. I think a lot of marketing managers do want to buy better, do want to, you know, buy consciously suppliers that has ethical business practices and whatnot. They want to know all that, but in our industry, all that information has always not been relevant. It's an industry that has a bad rep of trying to excel at the lowest point lowest price point possible. And as a more boutique distributor, you know, we have the opportunity to educate and spend time with potential buyers and clients on how awesome this industry is and how much behind-the-scenes work about sustainability, about sourcing right, is important to us as a distributor and as a supplier as well. Unfortunately, a lot of end users don't see that part. They only see what's available online. Most of the time it's a generic website that's copy and paste from our associations, and there's very little mention about how products are made and why it's important to buy right. 90% of the websites are just cookie cutters, unfortunately.

If you're an end client marketing person, and you know, to some extent that the author Elizabeth Segren is also an end user in our own right, researching the industry, Googling around promotional products. If you're searching for promotional products online, you're going to immediately see the big online players that have dominated the AdWords and SEO space, and that's great. You then click onto maybe the bottom of the first page or the second, third page of Google results, you're then going to start to see a lot of white label websites that look the same for various distributors that might be in that market. And so what's happening is that the primary search results that are getting returned for an end client is telling this same very generic product-driven story, and that is what it is. But I think that it's then pretty easy to then determine that this industry is full of a bunch of lookalike cheap products that can be purchased at the lowest price. And I know that we've talked a lot about this in sessions that we've done, but it's such an opportunity for more distributors to, and suppliers to differentiate themselves through story through case studies, through the things that really make these products magical as opposed to them just being a SKU number, that they represent something more than that. And I think when that happens, and Winston, I know certainly with your great distributorship, your clients, I mean, they don't see you as a swag guy, they think of you as a storyteller or a magician of sorts because you're producing these products that really have this amazing impact on their business. So, I think we need to see more of that, not more of the product-driven stuff.

Yeah, Winston, I've always admired your style sensibility personally. It's a passion of yours, but also it's definitely reflected in the company you've built. What's interesting, Mark, about what you just said too is that there are two things I think when I, when I think of the silver lining around this article. One of the silver lining aspects of this article is that when you approach your clients with this in context, what can happen is they'll actually buy right. When they buy right, they actually buy better. And you guys know what I'm talking about. Instead of buying X thousand of the cheapest item they can find, they buy a quantity of a better item. Actually, it's better business for us to sell more appropriately in the long run. It also aids in client retention and everything else. But also, Mark, to your point, and that's something I think that she didn't explicitly say, but she certainly did say it without using the words, and that was the emotional connection to the brands that she loves is critical. And once we tap into that with the right product, it's gold.

I think it's so exciting. I mean, I shared the story of me being an end client just a couple of moments ago when I went to Turkey and the Wolf, this weird little restaurant that I connected with and bought this shirt for $22 that I've since worn 6 times. And so, I've been an end client there and you get that special feeling when you put that on. And Bobby, you said the same thing with the bag that you have from Portland. I also think, you know, as people that have all been or are distributors in the industry right now, you think about that special feeling you get when you have designed a program for an end client that really pops, that you're really proud of. And you as a distributor see on social media your client or your client's clients posting pictures to social media about how much they love X client's product. And you feel this sense of pride because you were the one that put that together. You're the one who designed that. You're the one who made that happen and are responsible for driving demonstrable ROI. That tingly feeling that you get is one that I think is unique to our space, and it's that tingly feeling that she wrote about with the New Yorker tote and the NPR tote. I know we've mentioned it so many times, but it's like that, that special feeling you get is what this business is at its heart. And, I think that that's the thing that I really took from this article was how can we double down on that so that way more of our industry can be doing that so that it's not the cheap USBs and cheap pens and all that stuff. And listen, cheap pens and USBs, I'd hate to be focusing on those product categories. When you do a pen right and you do a USB right, I can tell you they pop like no one's business. But if you do it wrong, you get, you know, lambasted in an article like this.

You got to treat promotional products as a marketing tool and not just as a commodity like tissue paper or, you know, something that just makes you full. You know, you can't look at promotional products like that. Promotional products gives end users and consumers a chance to kind of, you know, like Bobby said, to have that emotional connection with a brand that they love, follow, adore. Marketers or people that are responsible for purchases of promotional products just need to understand that, you know, the products that they produce will cause emotional reactions.

They're triggers, right? Yeah, they're triggers. We've all been doing this a long time, but there are folks who tuned into this SKU Cast who are brand new in the business. So for those that are brand new in the business, One of the first most important questions you can ask your customer is why. Why do you want this? How is it going to be used? What emotional connection do we want to actually create for the brand? What do we want to evoke with this campaign? In this case, the New Yorker tote bag, which I have to keep going back to because I love it so much, was about new sales. They wanted to drive sales with this tote bag. And what it ended up becoming was also a customer retention tool because she actually unsubscribed. So I'm a subscriber. This is funny to me. I, I had never thought about this. She unsubscribed then so she could resubscribe and get the tote bag. And I just love that story. So I'm a subscriber, I pay $120 a year for my New Yorker subscription. And what's funny to me is that if this is about new sales, it's also about client retention. If I'm a subscriber for 10 years, that's $1,200. A tote bag at half a million pieces would be— what do you guys think? It'd be under a dollar? Would it be a dollar to two? For sure. But Certainly under a dollar, right?

It depends on quality, right?

Right.

I think it's more like a dollar to two, because when you look at it, it's a pretty quality bag.

It may even be a little bit more.

But that's about 1% of my 10-year subscription, which does not include advertising that I'll provide for The New Yorker as I carry it where I go, nor the money that I'll spend with those advertisers in the magazine, on the website. So to me, it's, it's almost just like it's a great story. It's like the perfect promotion.

Promotional products work. It's a $26 billion industry. It moves the needles. And I think that's why companies like Fast Companies and, you know, many other magazines like Fast Company are interested. And I'm reading between the lines, and it's just asking for people to do better, right? Maybe it isn't the shitty products that she gets elsewhere, but if it's better thought of, you know, she might become a fan.

Well, guys, thank you very much. Winston, thanks for jumping in here on a SkuCast. It was really good to have you here. Thank you very much. Marcus, thanks.

Thanks, Bobby. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast.

Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com.

Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening. Mm-hmm.