When Toys Work

Situation

We have worked with many university recruitment and admissions offices where other parts of the campus have looked to them for giveaways or other swag for their own community events. Usually these events do not have a direct student recruitment effect so the admissions office has found itself in the awkward position of either relinquishing some of its recruitment resources for other purposes or over-extending its budget. To complicate matters, usually the kind of giveaways that recruitment and admissions offices have on hand are specifically for recruiting incoming students and not particularly desirable for the kinds of events being sponsored by those other offices.

Solution

We have found great success in partnering directly with those other campus offices to consider what kinds of giveaways would be the most relevant for their target populations, and then finding inexpensive ways to produce something along those lines.

For one university community sponsoring an outdoor summer block party we landed on the idea of bubbles. Branding a bottle of bubbles is not something we would normally recommend for student recruitment purposes because the actual item has relatively little longevity. Once the branded bottle has been exhausted it will almost certainly go into the trash. For a community block party however, this is perfect. Bubbles are self-promoting in the sense that once someone starts to blow them and they fly all over, everyone else wants to do that too! And we are only looking for branding power to extend through the duration of the event, not necessarily that much longer. Finally, bubbles are so inexpensive to produce!

We also came up with a similar idea for other simple toys. Bouncy balls are one great example. While very inexpensive (which is ideal), it’s something that you could never give away at a school without infuriating teachers and administrators and ruining the day. On the other hand they would work perfectly for an outdoor event. Tops are another great example, simple to play with, easier to control, and inexpensive to produce.

Success

We found great success in producing and distributing this kind of giveaway. The impact of the branding is almost a bonus. The primary goal is the chance to strengthen relationships with other brand-promoters in cost-effective ways.