Corporate Gifting Has Lost Its Strategy
Sometimes a journalist captures what an entire industry has stopped seeing about itself.
In 2018, Elizabeth Segran, Ph.D. wrote in Fast Company about the pile of tote bags she gathered every few months from conferences and product launches. Too flimsy for the grocery store, turned away by Goodwill, and finally thrown in the trash. Then she traced each one back: cotton or oil-based plastic, sewn in low-wage factories, shipped across the world, all so a company could, in her words, "marginally improve its brand recognition."
What struck me when I read it is how precisely she detailed the issues with corporate gifting I had come to understand from the other side of the table, at the highest levels of diplomatic gifting.
As a Diplomatic Gifts Officer, I designed gifts U.S. Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Secretaries of State presented to heads of state. Every element was chosen to advance a relationship, an objective, a moment between two nations. I watched those gifts redirect bilateral meetings. That became my standard for every gift.
The monotony is hard to watch. Corporate gifting has lost its strategy. Billions of dollars every year, the same objects ordered in bulk, a logo swapped onto each one, with no thought for the people receiving them or what the company needs from those relationships.
The gifts are not working. The investment is not working. And the people on the receiving end feel it. So do the landfills.
The corporate gifting industry is begging for change. So is the environment. So is human connection. So are the budgets paying for it.
The shift I am building toward is a new standard for the objects a company places in someone's hands, across every layer of people who hold a stake in the company and every layer the company holds a stake in: the cabinet-level official across the table in a foreign market, the board member who shaped its direction, the partner it is building the next decade with, the client whose loyalty it cannot afford to lose, and the team that delivered.
With each element, from the material to the engraving to the story behind it, designed to advance the company.
These objects are an extension of the company itself. They are what stays behind with the people a company is working to win, keep, honor, and grow with, after the meeting ends.
Gifts designed to perform.
Elizabeth closed her piece by calling on companies to change their behavior and give people something they would actually remember. Eight years later, the call remains.
If you have a stake in your company's corporate gifts, I encourage you to read her piece. Let it challenge the way you see gifts, the potential they hold, and why it is time to disrupt this industry and fundamentally change it.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90260185/its-time-to-stop-spending-billions-on-cheap-conference-swag
