Walk into any corporate storage room and you'll find the evidence.
Boxes of branded fidget spinners from 2017. Tote bags with typos. Water bottles that leak. Stress balls that don't relieve stress…they create it.
This is the Swag Industrial Complex in action.
I walked into a client's office and spotted an old branded stress ball gathering dust in their junk drawer.
Punch to the gut.
I sold them those stress balls. Thousands of dollars down the drain on something that screamed "we didn't think this through."
That was my wake-up call. Swag isn't harmless freebies. It's brand sabotage disguised as marketing.
Here's what's happening:
Trade shows become graveyards of forgotten giveaways. Attendees fill bags with branded junk, then discard it before reaching their cars.
Client gifts get chosen at the 11th hour from online catalogs. No strategy. No thought. Just panic-driven purchases.
Employee onboarding packages filled with items destined for junk drawers. We're literally training new hires to throw away our brand.
Event "branded gifts" that communicate one message: We don't value your time or attention.
In a screen-dominated world, tangible items are exponentially more valuable. We have this incredible opportunity to build deeper relationships with our audiences.
And we're wasting it on $3 stress balls.
Arianna Huffington nailed it: "People think in stories, not stats." Yet we're handing out cold, calculated, forgettable objects that tell no story except "we bought in bulk."
The companies succeeding in the next decade won't have the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones who understand that every piece of branded merchandise is a story waiting to be told.
While competitors fill storage rooms with forgotten fidget spinners, smart brands are creating physical experiences that people actually want to keep.
Time to burn the playbook and build something better.
Because until we stop treating merchandise like an afterthought, we'll keep training people to throw away our brands.
