At the heart of any corporate marketing strategy is the company brand. It is, in the simplest, most straightforward terms, the core of the corporate identity. It is, as the American Marketing Association defines it, ‘a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’. A brand is a representation of a company and all that it stands for. Branding, meanwhile, is establishing your brand as the product or service for a particular need. This aims to put a particular brand onto consumers’ consciousness. One way to reach out to any potential market is through promotional products.

Kleenex, for one, is a great example of branding, because of its common association for facial tissue paper. Tearing up? Here, have some Kleenex. This is the aim of any company — not to just offer the brand as a product or service, but to make this said brand synonymous to a particular product or service. And among the many ways of branding, other than advertising through traditional and new media, promotional products have proven to be the easiest way to consumers’ hearts. According to the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), a study of American consumers show that they truly enjoy promotional items, and for over two centuries, these promotional items have been a big part of consumers’ daily lives, proving their usefulness as tools and their effectiveness as long-lasting means of branding and advertising.

Promotional products reinforce branding because of the impact these items have on consumers. A 2009 PPAI study fielded by MarketTools, Inc. on the effectiveness of promotional items as an advertising medium found that 83 percent of Americans like receiving promotional items with an advertising message. At the same time, 69 percent would pick up a promotional item if they found it to be useful. So this makes it important to choose the kind of promotional products that are not only useful, but these should also represent your brand well and would be able to send a clear message about your business. The goal of using promotional products is not only to advertise your business and brand, but to reach out to your intended market and resonate with your consumers. This direct impact would be seen in the rate of the recall of the product and the advertiser in association with the promotional items, which in turn would influence their purchase habits.