Shopping Bags- The Secret Weapon for Promotions

The printed shopping bag has been around for a long time, with good reason. It’s a particularly effective promotional tool in its own right. Everyone has had a few good shopping bags which were useful for so many things that they were kept on principle. People actually collect them, simply because they're so handy. These shopping bags can be fashion statements from upmarket shops, good things to carry all those portable things, and above all, valued by consumers.

The really great shopping bags are never thrown out. They may be kept for years, or even decades. That’s their great strength as products, and it also applies to their role in marketing terms. In marketing, the value that consumers put on products is critically important. Consumers literally measure the value of products according to a range of factors:
-Appearance
-Utility and functionality
-Cost
-Suitability for personal purposes

All very practical considerations, and they’re also the main reasons that the basic shopping bag has taken on a life of its own as a business product. From the shopping bags came the now almost universal promotional bags. These are a different species in some ways, but they work on very much the same principles.

The promotional bags have evolved since their humble beginnings as branded packaging for promotional goods. Now, the new promotional bags are all-purpose, high value things like Tote bags, or even symbols of important concepts like the famous Fair Trade bags promoting global trade. There’s almost nothing a bag can’t do, and markets around the world are developing the bag as a promotional tool par excellence in endless different ways.

For example:
The wine industry is packaging-conscious to an almost obsessive degree. If you’ve seen the little wine bottle shopping bags with the sleeves to hold the bottles inside, you’ll know how useful these bags are. You can also put in French bread, and use the other sleeves to old other useful things. It looks so trendy it’s terrifying, and a slightly larger bag of this sort, with a brand, is a true expression of chic, in anyone’s language.

Sales people are often overloaded with a range of knickknacks, promo items and other things which can take forever to organize. With a branded promotional bag, and you can get a lot of sales materials, special promotional gifts, and other very effective selling materials into a bag, and distribute it to a seminar, workshop, or industry meeting with ease.

People simply do not throw out these useful bags. Ironically, the bag itself is sometimes the most appreciated thing in the promo handout. People lose fridge magnets, break executive toys, drop electronic gadgets and will carefully file everything else where they can’t find it, but not the bag. The bag stays, because it’s functional. It will probably be a fixture in the car, used for anything and everything.

The moral of the shopping bags and promotional bags is “If you want to get a message across, give people something they’ll actually use.” Some of the biggest retailers and corporations on Earth do just that. If you want to give your business a portable sales point, use branded bags.