If you are looking for a promotional product to use in your next marketing campaign but are in a panic because you’ve already exhausted the ‘everyday’ repertoire of mouse mats, USB keyrings and mugs then RELAX, we may well be able to help you!

Guaranteed to break the ice as a hand out at your next exhibition, or to grab your customers attention when used as a piece of direct mail,  our products offer a terrific opportunity in promotional printing as there are no limits regarding what you want to print or where you want to print it. The whole product becomes your own unique piece of promotional advertising and you don’t even need to choose from our standard range of promotional merchandise as virtually everything that you see can be tweaked and twisted to make your own custom promotional products.

Because of the versatility of our type of product there will be something here to suit pretty well every marketing idea and every type of advertising, promotional or marketing campaign. The products are eminently suitable for direct mail campaigns. They offer what we call “The Oomph! Factor” adding elements of surprise, movement and fun to what might otherwise have proved to be a staid or humdrum campaign.

Our products are known to generate high response when used in direct marketing campaigns. They are known to be handled over and over again because of the tactile nature of the movements. And they are also known to stay on desks for ages. To guarantee this, many of our customers convert the standard products into desk top calendars, pen pots and desk tidies and at the same time give the new products their own unique flavour by adding original text and graphics.

What makes one bottle promotion stand out from the others on your supermarket shelves? Is it the actual offer or promotion or is it the design of the promotional product? Having searched long and hard to find something new in this niche area of in-store advertising I must admit to having been disappointed.

Bottle after bottle in your supermarket drinks aisle will be virtually the same shape. There will be no more than half a dozen “see-through” colours but there will be a very colourful and attractive variation in label designs and bottle caps. Every now and then you will see something wrapped around or hanging from a bottle neck and that will be an on-bottle promotion or an item of bottle media.

Even on the most crowded supermarket drinks shelves there are never more that a handful of on-bottle promotions running at any one time so you might be excused for thinking that customers who are scanning the shelves will easily notice these promotions. You might think that because there are not many of them that they will really stand out on the shelves but do they? The styles of bottle media seem not to have changed for ages and maybe it is a case of over familiarity that makes a promotion so easy to overlook.

Sure, shoppers will see the bottle promotions but will their gaze rest upon the bottles with the promotion? I say not, unless the choice of bottle media is one that really sets the bottle apart from the others and so I think that it is time for a change if a promotion is to stand out in a crowd.

One product that will certainly do that is our new Bottle Banner which is a type of bottle collar. The Bottle Banner is a new marketing idea - an interlocking product that sits right on the bottle top, rather like a flag and giving the most eye-catching of displays. The product is a real change from the norm for bottle media in general and bottle collars in particular and it certainly does stand out from a crowd. The display is as big as it can get without infringing on the space required by the neighbouring bottles on the supermarket shelves.

This particular style of bottle collar was designed with versatility in mind and it employs an interlocking device that allows it to look perfectly at home on bottles that traditionally hold household cleaning materials. Enormous plastic bottles of milk with large carry handles present no problem whatsoever. Bottles with trigger spray handles such as kitchen and bathroom cleaners are perfectly suited to this big display bottle collar. When a Bottle Banner is to be used on these types of bottles it needs to be interlocked at the bottle packing plant and it will be supplied flat, cut and creased but not interlocked. The interlocking device is very simple, however, and takes only seconds to attach.

The Bottle banner is a very versatile and impressive inclusion in The Bottle Boutique.

When you walk down the wines and spirits aisle in your local supermarket you will occasionally see a bottle with a promotional product hanging from the bottleneck or maybe the bottle has something wrapped around its neck like a collar. These bottle promotions are known as bottle tags, bottle collars and bottle hangers. You will have seen them countless times but how many times has a bottle promotion really stood out and caught your eye?

You might think that advertisers would believe that the attention-grabbing qualities of the bottle media would be paramount to the success of the bottle promotion and yet there doesn’t seem to be anything on the wines and spirits bottle shelves that shouts out “look at me”.

Also, the promotional products always seem so small. The “small print” on the back of a bottle collar really is printed very small. Bottle promotions need to be bigger not only from the point of view of visibility on the shelves but also to give the consumer some proper information regarding the promotion.

Bottle media is no different from any other form of supermarket advertising inasmuch as it has to be seen in order for it to work. In the case of on-bottle marketing there is another requisite step if the promotion is to be a success and that is for the consumer to actually participate. This could mean that the consumer has to complete and send off an entry form printed on the back of the bottle collar to enter a competition. It could be that a voucher is printed on the bottle tag for redemption by the consumer at the time of a later purchase. It could be that the bottle hanger has an offer that clicks in only when the consumer replies by email.

In each of these instances it strikes me that the promotion might be incidental to the bottle purchase if the consumer wasn’t particularly drawn to the promotion in the first place. Surely, if the bottle promotion had a greater visual attraction then the casual consumer might be persuaded to choose that bottle of red wine over the other 50 varieties of red wines in the same section. Furthermore, if the bottle promotion was easier to read and contained lots of information then that might provide the consumer with a greater enticement to join in the promotion. This seems to me to be good marketing idea and a big step forward for the advertiser.

The big question is this, with a bottleneck seemingly offering such a limited amount of space, how can the visual display and the print area be increased in order to achieve these desirable goals? We have taken up the gauntlet on behalf of beleaguered designers by launching a range of new bottle media called The Bottle Boutique which includes new products such as bottle bows, bottle banners and bottle balls. Taking the idea of bottle collars one step further, we have even come up with a bottle collar and tie. Maybe advertisers will take note and add some new life to the supermarket shelves.

If you’re about to embark on your next creative brief and are looking for new ideas, our fantastic sample pack is quite probably the most inspirational marketing tool available in the UK today and it doesn’t cost you a bean!

The box is absolutely packed with innovative and creative advertising and marketing ideas and ideas for promotions. Even with our new demonstrational video clips, our website cannot begin to do justice to these fantastic promotional products. If you really need new marketing and advertising ideas you need to see them for yourself to experience the full amazing impact. If you are involved in marketing you should take the opportunity to get your hands on this amazing pack.

Just about everything in the pack is suitable for direct mail and so if you are looking for direct marketing ideas - this is the pack for you. And it’s not just the products that offer an outlet for your promotional ideas. The automatic 3-D pop-up products fold down into neat printed mailing packs and so you can even transfer your direct marketing ideas to the envelope! Send for your free pack of direct marketing ideas today.

So here’s your dilema, you need to provide quite a lot of information to the attendees of your latest promotional event or exhibition - you want to be able to guide them around with a floorplan of your event as well as show them what time your various quest speakers will appear by listing the event agenda – but you don’t want people to have their hands full as soon as they walk through the door as this would prevent them from taking in everything on offer once they arrive at your event. This being the case, you need an advertising product that’s big enough to carry all your important information but small enough that the attendee can just tuck it in their pocket, ready for another quick glance and reminder at any moment.

A size which fits neatly into the palm of the hand is A7, which is approximately 105mm x 75mm. Our standard pocket-sized media offerings in this size bracket are the Hidden Book, The U-Card and Promotional Swatch Cards. The Hidden Book promotional advertising product is a triumph for a simple folding technique. Starting life as an A4 sheet, the Hidden Book folds to make an 8-page book but the book unfolds and refolds to make a completely different 8-page book. This is a good example of an interactive piece of pocket media. The U-Card is similar inasmuch as it, too, starts off as an A4 sheet and folds down to an A7 book but the U-card folds in a totally different way. Promotional swatch cards are often produced in A7 format and this size is only just behind credit card size in popularity.

We also make a quite spectacular promotional advertising product in this handy size – the Tripleburst. This product is an outstanding example of just what can be achieved with pocket-sized products and a really neat marketing idea. From a folded size of A7, the Tripleburst opens with a flourish to reveal 3 starburst displays stretching out to 150mm x 665m!!!

At the top end of the pocket-sized media range, at least size wise, come the very popular Starburst promotional advertising products. By far and away the most popular size that produce is A6 (approx 150mm x 105mm) but they come in various combinations. Some are made with double starburst displays, others have 4-panel cover and some have a 3-panel cover but they all fold down to a size that fits neatly into your jacket pocket or handbag, thereby squeezing into the pocket-sized media category.