My Best Promotion

Long-time industry speaker and sales coach Rosalie Marcus, the Promo Biz Coach, provided this month's My Best Promotion. Marcus chose a successful safety program she ran for years, an incentive-based gift program for a large national bakery. To make the program work, Marcus explained how she eliminated budget issues, picked items for a slightly unconventional user base, and kept it fresh and repeating for years.

Promo Marketing: Could you briefly describe the promotion?

Rosalie Marcus: This was something I did several years ago, and it repeated for several years. It was a safety program for a large national bakery.

They were having a lot of accidents, and every time they had an accident in the bakery, they would have to shut down their machinery, pay out workman's comp claims, and lose a lot of productivity and a lot of money. So the objective was, "What can we do to get our workers to work more safely?" So we came up with the idea that every month that they could go without an accident, they would get a promotional gift.

For the monthly gift, they were smaller items, generally under $10 a piece. We did things like flashlights, toolkits, commuter mugs, T-shirts, safety calendars, things like that. It had to be a unisex gift, because they were men and women, and they were factory workers, so it wouldn't be something that would sit on the desk. Most of the things were things they could use while commuting to work.

The program worked so well they went for one full year without an accident. At the end of the year, they got a jacket that was about $75 that they loved. It had the name of bakery and something to do with the program going for 365 days without an accident embroidered on its back.