The Ultimate Checklist for Brand Merchandise
Brand merchandise turns customers into fans.
Selling brand merchandise is one of the easiest, most cost effective ways for you to create an instant bond with your customer and generate additional profits.
In fact, 77% of consumers say they stayed loyal to specific brands for 10 years or more. Customer brand loyalty is big even for millennial consumers. Despite their relatively young age, they already have long-term relationships with brands at the rate of 60%. People grow to love certain brands due to the quality of products and service. They often go out of their way to buy from them. The intent of your merchandising program should be to turn these customers into fans.
Match your products to your brand.
To improve your results for your brand merchandise program, follow these simple guidelines:
What products would best fit your business?
A well-planned item that correlates to your brand values can stay with your customers for months, even years. There is a wide array of products available such as t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, glassware and more.
Consider the following when planning your merchandise program:
Branding: Do your merchandise need to reflect brand cornerstones such as power, durability, or luxury? Does the product make sense for your business?
Audience: What demographic are you looking to reach?
What colors would you like included?
90 percent of consumers recognize the branding of products through elements such as color. Choose colors that reflect your company branding to help the promotional products resonate better with customers.
Here are some quick pointers:
Use consistent colors for branding.
Coordinate colors with applicable images.
Use complementary colors to create high contrast and make an image standout. Complementary colors are any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel. For example, blue and orange, or red and green.
What type of imprint do you need?
A variety of imprints are available for brand merchandise, including screen printing, embroidery, dye sublimation, and more.
Here are the top two options:
Silk Screen: In this process, the colors are printed as solid areas and used when the colors or the image can be separated into 10 or fewer colors. The spot colors and a screen are used to apply the imagery and message to the product.
Four-Color Process Full-Color: This is the process of combining four basic colors (CMYK) to create a printed color picture of colors composed from the basic four colors. It allows for colored images to maintain quality when printed.
How are you going to market and distribute your brand merchandise?
The first consideration is to choose to use a physical and/or virtual storefront. Many businesses are successful with their merchandising with a physical “souvenir shop” especially if your business has high foot traffic and a strong customer experience to the location.
Other businesses succeed with a virtual storefront. Utilizing email marketing, they are able to generate sales while the customer is away from their business. This has the added benefit of minimizing inventory and storage space, especially if utilizing a fulfillment service.
What else is important for brand merchandise?
Many products have a minimum order quantity. Keep this in mind as you plan your inventory, and specify the quantity you need based on how you intend to use them.
It’s also important to think about:
Specific marketing objectives
Seasonal considerations
Sizes (if applicable)
Deadlines and other requests
Brand merchandise is a great way to leverage your current brand equity and increase your revenue and profitability. Understanding your brand and your customers are the two greatest factors in a successful merchandise program.