My Best Promotion

PM: What made this a good promotion for you?

DD: It's like I said, in terms of touchpoints back to me, I've never had more of that than with this gift. I think too from a personal perspective, because I like to cook so much I've been able to share some of what I like to do outside of work with my customers, so that the relationship gets deeper. And then too, because of the success of it, we're looking at doing a mid-year follow-up to those folks with some of the housewares items that Evans Manufacturing has available to say, "Hey, I hope you're enjoying the book, here's additional items for your kitchen." So I would say that the purpose wasn't to build a campaign, but now because of the success and the response that we've had, we're starting to look for ways to tie that in.

PM: What was the best decision you made with this program, and why?

DD: I think it's hard to mess up breakfast. Like, they're eggs, and if you started out with over-easy, it's pretty easy to make scrambled. If it goes bad, there's a way you can truly make lemonade out of lemons. I think with a book like this there's a lot of chance for individual success by the recipient because it's not hard, you know?

PM: Did you run into any problems with the promotion, and if so, how did you overcome them?

DD: Well, we probably started the project too late. You know, you work in the promotional industry, you have your event dates, and you have a certain window for what we call holiday gift distribution. I would say that I knew I wanted to do this book in September, but I didn't buckle down until early November. The people at The Book Company, they met the deadline and made it happen, but certainly we became the client in the sense of you knew what you needed to do, but you didn't do it when you should have. But you know, at the end of the day, we got it to them when they needed to get it, they did what they said they're going to do, and it all worked out.