Promotional products represent a key ingredient of marketing and advertising campaigns run by businesses and organisations, from major blue chips and government bodies to hospitals, universities, schools and clubs.

Promotional products have a wide variety of uses. According to the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) the top ten uses are: business gifts, trade shows, brand awareness, employee relations and events, public relations, dealer/distributor programmes, new customer/account generation, new product or service introduction, employee service awards, and not-for-profit fundraising programmes.

Various studies have been undertaken to prove the usefulness of promotional products. One of these concluded that pre-show mailings which include promotional products are more effective than mailings without in terms of generating traffic to an exhibitor's booth. The experiment found that by either including a promotional product with the mailing or an offer for a higher value item to be claimed at the show led to a larger number of recipients visiting a booth to see the exhibitor's product offerings.

Other effective uses for promotional products include market research, corporate communications, incentive schemes, customer referral, public awareness campaigns, internal promotions and encouraging brand loyalty.

One of the many attractions of promotional products is that they can be used alone or integrated with other advertising media. They complement and actually increase the effectiveness of other media such as print and television.
As we have seen, there are numerous marketing platforms which reap significant benefits from the use of promotional products.