If you have a product you’re distributing through retail outlets you have, potentially, the largest advertising medium of all—advertising printed on the carton, label, or packing slips of the products themselves. And best of all, it costs almost nothing!

Direct response advertising using this medium can be a gold-mine of extra revenue—if you don’t have a product you can sell on your “space,” or barter that space to someone who does!


Here’s a couple of examples that show the incredible possibilities:

(1) Over a period of three years toy manufacturer Hasbro/Bradley placed mini-catalogs inside 30 million packages of big Christmas sellers—G.I. Joe and My Little Pony. Response rate was 5%, meaning 1.5 million people placed an order directly and were added to the company’s database.

(2) Williamson-Dickie, manufacturer of Dickies, placed inside the pocket of each garment a slip of paper saying, “Inspected by ____.” Dickies used the blank space on the slip’s other side to say, “Ask your dealer about other Dickies products or call toll-free for a free catalog.”

This simple device produced most of the names in the database of nearly 400,000 that Dickies uses for its direct sales.

For scores of marketing, advertising and promotional ideas read the FastStart Program:
FAST

To stay abreast of the dynamic barter marketplace refer to BarterNews.com regularly:
NEWS

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Marketing, Purchasing & Financing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.