People won’t think to use your product or service if they don’t know your brand.
Since you have to wear clothes, why not put them to work marketing your product or service? It’s an easy win for your company, and in some instances, such as networking events and conferences corporate clothing will help you stand out in a sea of suits.
Every time I wear branded clothing, someone comments and asks me about my company.
Even as far back as College Pro Painters, our painters wore shirts emblazoned with our logo, so that while they were up on ladders people would see our brand. This also proves helpful when recruiting for new employees: one summer I had my painters wear their painting shirts with huge logos to the university pub. I bribed them with free beer to do it, and needless to say, it helped me find new painters every time.
While building 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, I would place my branded jacket on the outside of chairs so it would be seen while I was sitting down. On planes, I’d fold it in such a way that the logo stood out even when placed in overhead bins. I was relentlessly getting my name out to prospects. I even made license plates with my company name on it for two companies I built. At conferences of sometimes 2,000 people there were four of us in 1-800-GOT-JUNK? fleeces with huge logos on our backs. People thought there were at least 20 of us walking around because they saw our logos so often in the middle of all the suits.
April 27, 2010
Well, I’m in the corporate gift, apparel and licensing biz so obviously biased. My fave story about wearing my brand is this: in 2002 I went to an early 2010 Olympics conference sponsored by the Vancouver Board of Trade. All these VANOC suits (literally) were walking around in their suits and I wore my slacks, shirt, tie and an AWESOME 2010 Track jacket that I’d designed with huge Olympic logos (I was a licensee at the time). I was telling my friend who was (is) an EVP at major financial institution that I felt a bit out of place amongst all the suits. She looked me in the eye and said, “Well, you’re not in the business of selling suits are you – you sell Olympic swag right?” Oh man that was a nugget of wisdom!
I constantly get customers that ask me to tone down their logo, make it subtle. I always ask them why? Don’t you want people to act as a billboard, to proudly wear your logo? If you’re getting resistance maybe: your logo sucks; your brand sucks (ie: the image, what you stand for); the product you’re picking sucks; the decoration sucks; or all of the above. Push the companies who are supplying your products (like me) to give you better designed products from true brandnames that people will be proud to wear. If you give staff an awesome Nike golf shirt with a beautiful logo placed in a really cool location – something that looks like it just walked out of a retail store: they will WEAR it. If you give them a crappy Pique cotton golf shirt that fades, shrinks and looks terrible, probably not.