Promotional Products Market and Digital Transformation
As part of the industrial revolution that is the Internet, the promotional products business must grasp the challenges of e-commerce and digital marketing. The main advantages of communication through objects must be conveyed through new channels.
It is essential to establish a true digitalization strategy through a series of initiatives. The first concerns management, particularly the implementation of a new vision for human resources.
First observation: the agility of promotional product companies
Regarding the collaborative vision: "Everything is moving faster. A manager has a much smaller visibility horizon than they did 15 years ago. We can no longer rely on the same benchmarks. Instead of being quite monolithic and having a top-down flow of information and projects, we are forced to structure the organization in a way that makes it agile."
The Spirit of Openness: Customer Expectations at the Heart of Strategies
The key to digital repositioning is, above all, the human element. A company's leader must show curiosity, taking an interest in both new technologies and new uses and behaviors. The use of customer relationship management (CRM) software, communication via social networks, or dynamic online catalogs—modern tools and customer expectations must now be taken into account.
For the promotional products specialist, this translates into increasingly specific requests leading to a more advanced personalization of promotional items and a faster processing time. To stand out from the competition, it is necessary to not only be in sync but to anticipate the desires of the customer.
It is up to the players in the promotional products market to fully grasp the current and upcoming technological and commercial challenges.
Imagining the Future of the Promotional Products Market
This commitment to the digital transformation project must be done methodically. American management expert Peter Ferdinand Drucker advocates an approach called SMART, consisting of five objectives:
- Specify: target a subject to focus on.
- Measure: use an indicator to record progress.
- Assign: designate one or more people in charge of the project.
- Achieve: define the results to be achieved.
- Temporalize: establish a project timeline.
This method aims, on a small scale, to test new processes and to question the relevance of established codes.
Changing habits also means reevaluating the company's values to align them with current challenges. One must be able to imagine future paradigm shifts, being proactive in response to situations to avoid being overtaken, similar to the hospitality industry that failed to anticipate the emergence of the Airbnb model or taxi drivers caught off guard by the Uber system.
Testing Phases
Reevaluating one’s positioning and operating mode requires a structured and evolving approach. Without immediately launching too large-scale projects, it is advisable to develop small innovations that, once validated internally, will confirm the relevance of new objectives.
To ensure an effective yet progressive overhaul, digital transformation specialists recommend implementing marketing experiences based on the concept of fail fast. Far from encouraging failure, this method involves testing a very simple prototype (MVP for Minimum Viable Project) in a test market, such as a new type of promotional product produced in limited quantities and aimed at a sample of clients.
The flexibility of this type of experience allows for rapid feedback leading to validation or cessation, followed by improvement of a product. This accelerated optimization avoids loss-making developments and simultaneously maintains coherence within the company.
The Importance of Management
Change is frightening, especially in the corporate world and particularly in the now-mature promotional products market. It is up to the manager to deploy new structural and commercial strategies while reassuring employees and collaborators. To do this, the manager must implement a detailed action plan (objectives, average commitments, timeline) that can reassure but also inspire the team.
The clarity of the strategy is essential to avoid misunderstandings and other miscommunications, which are sources of tension and stress. The rhythm, dosage, and prioritization of new advancements are also parameters the manager must consider to prevent any dysfunction and obtain the consent of employees and collaborators.
The collaborative spirit is central. The ability to foster initiatives, ideas, and projects from anywhere in the organization, preserve them, nurture them, allocate budgets to them, and support them is fundamental.
Collaboration is indeed the engine of digital transformation, as it is by sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas that members of a company engage in a project. It is up to the manager to unite efforts towards targeted and clear objectives for everyone involved.
The manager must guide their team through the steps of the company's digital transformation; their actions must be ongoing and concrete. Instead of mere declarations, the new strategies implemented must manifest in demonstrations (data, diagrams, prototypes). The manager must lead by example: mastering not only the new concepts but also the new tools and practices.
“We need people who will think differently, who will not be afraid, who will bring courage, who will bring commitment, who want to carry projects, and have an entrepreneurial mindset.”
In the context of implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution, the manager must master the new protocols to convince employees and collaborators of the relevance of this new process for the company (capturing, processing, and analyzing information related to clients to anticipate their needs and fulfill them).
This instantiation phase must be closely monitored by the manager as it corresponds to the moment when they may face criticism from those who have not spontaneously embraced the changes. The manager of the promotional products company must support their teams, demonstrate that progress is being made (despite challenges), and encourage personnel to step out of their comfort zones (support, rewards, bonuses, promotions, self-fulfillment).
Staying Curious
Leadership is rooted in curiosity across diverse fields: being interested in various subjects and disciplines to broaden one’s thinking, grasp trends, and anticipate changes. Conferences, books, specialized websites, documentaries, podcasts, social networks—the leader of tomorrow's company must be informed and connected with different realms (economics, technology, sociology, fashion...). This global vision ultimately enables quick assessment of market disruptions (changes in customer buying behavior, aggressive competition, stock shortages, price increases, new laws...) and allows for appropriate reactions to avoid crises. Curiosity helps constantly refine one’s business strategy; it is an essential quality in a perpetually accelerating world.
The digital transformation of a company is a vast but necessary endeavor for those wanting to evolve in the market. The affirmation of a federating leadership, with structured, inspiring, and responsive management, is the first step in this transition. This will be followed by establishing a new corporate culture.
We must bring the question of why behind what we do. Through digital means, we have the opportunity to give great meaning to our collaborators.
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