Even in the season of lean corporate spending, the importance of corporate gifting has by no means diminished. Corporate gifting is vital for the purpose of reviving and reinforcing crucial business contacts!

If ever there is a great need than ever for a business to reinforce ties with their most valued and prestigious customers, business associates and partners, it is now!  The consolidation phase of a business can perhaps be the best opportunity to appreciate the association with them.

Top businesses also understand the importance of sticking to employees who provide excellent service and bring value to them. Presenting a gift will only enhance ties with them. This is the perfect time for a meaningful corporate activity. The times are challenging, but such challenges call for dramatic measures.

 With the prospect of slackening demand owing to the recession, you may not like to give rich lifestyle and luxury gifts like jewelry. But silverware, and other exclusive gifts will do the trick when it comes to building the bonds with corporate clients.It is necessary to follow the latest trends in the world of corporate gift. Now, professionals do not relish regular, ubiquitous gifts.

Tuned to the changing times, look to experiment and come up with innovative ideas. Personalization is a vital factor in gifting to select top-level executives, and even your employees. Generic promotional items are passé because people are trying to get be more personal with things. It is often seen as ‘unfashionable’ to be extravagant with gifts today, especially in international context.

The other key point that the marketing experts emphasis on is doing something nobody else is doing or hasn’t thought of doing thus far. This will provide you an entry point to establish your brand in the market.

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Corporate houses do everything possible to garner goodwill during the festive season. These are the times when companies gift their employees and clients. For example, to let their employees enjoy the Navratri festival, they even gift free passes for occasions like ‘Dandia Raas’.

Navratri, the season of nine nights, is celebrated with much glitter and glamour. It entails traditional dance types like garbas, dandia with the devotional songs in respect of Mother Amba and Mother Kaali. The people come together to have the blessings of the eternal mother, celebrate her presence within them and wish each other. Even celebrities join in the celebration of this traditional ritual of dance.

The profile of employees has become younger so it’s not surprising that several firms opt to celebrate such joyous occasions in the campus itself. Many companies join in the celebrations by gifting them traditional Navratri robes and free passes to the nine festive nights.

Many corporate houses sponsor local Navratri groups as part of innovative marketing methods to join the camaraderie during Navratri. Many of them come up with novel ideas like ‘designer dandias’.

True essence of corporate gifting is embedded in the fact that companies want to build a good relationship with their clients/customers. If the act of gifting motivates employees, corporate gifting at another level is part of a larger marketing & branding activity. It helps reconnect and re-establish a relationship with the key clients.

Festivals are a form of gettogether for most people across India. Festivals like Holi, Diwali, Christmas, Ganesh Festival and Navratri are rituals that are celebrated with great fervor, fun and frolic. This is the time of the year when corporate gifting takes place in a broader social context imparting a larger meaning to it. It acquires a whole new connotation during the festive season.

Gifting clients on such occasions is a must to spread brand identity and generate goodwill. Corporate gifting during  festivals is an opportunity to grow a company’s business that must be fully capitalized.

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Thanks to a truly challenging business environment, today’s businesses have been forced to think beyond lofty or impracticable promises of big bonuses and lavish retreats.

The businesses are now facing the tricky challenge of sticking to stringent budgets as well as conceiving newer, more novel ideas to show their ‘human’ side to clients and employees and to express their heartfelt appreciation. In such circumstances, a little help from outside is always welcome. This is where giftex 2009 came into play.

As you would agree, a gift is an ideal opportunity to make a lasting, fulfilling impression. Gift giving is not a mere ritual. It has emerged as a crucial corporate strategy as part of a larger jigsaw. Generic gifts picked by harried administrative assistants are giving way to personal gestures designed to indicate just how much your truly care for your corporate buddies.

The old cliché that ‘it’s the thought that counts’ has perhaps never been more dead-on that now! Today’s corporate culture demands more creative, more innovative and more thoughtful ways of expressing genuine appreciation to the people you care the most – clients, business contacts and your own employees.

In the field of sales & marketing services, clients expect gifting-industry consultants to be right on top of trends; be innovative and tuned to new technology. Part of their responsibility and role to our clients is to come up with innovative ways to get their messages across.

For those keen on sourcing the best corporate gifting options, Giftex, 2009 provided the perfect opportunity. The event spread over the spacious halls of Nehru Centre brought the best from the gifting industry under one umbrella.

A trendsetter and torchbearer in every sense of the corporate gifting industry, Giftex was a grand success. It was a perfect platform to grasp various finer aspects and get practical ideas to simplify the task of corporate gifting.

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At giftex, you will come across a wide range of products, which can be well used as a promotional gift for any corporate occasion. An umbrella is one such timely gift. It is one of the most useful articles for any person in the monsoon season. The weather may not be friendly always. And the umbrellas can be of great help in the summer too.

Your company can use this is an ideal promotional item that can serve the twin purpose of a gift and a brand promotion tool. You can gift it to your employees this monsoon. The collection of promotional umbrellas available ranges from the most popular Wentworth Golf Umbrellas to the cute Budget Mini Golf Umbrellas.

There are different types of umbrellas that meet the requirements of people. In fact, they can make a perfect gift for any season. However, they find it to be most useful in the rainy season, for example, a vacation in the monsoons.

The printed umbrellas are available in different sizes. People usually prefer colored umbrellas, as they look more refreshing and add a fashionable touch. Colored umbrellas give added benefits to the companies to choose the appropriate shade that suits their brand identity color. There are a number of standard colors available to choose from. The colors are chosen in such a manner that they will give fabulous display of the brand logo and the promotional message on them.

The double-colored printed umbrellas, for example, navy blue and white or the navy blue and yellow are the excellent color combination to display the brand name in the most contrasting background color. There are single-colored umbrellas available as well in the light shades and darker shades so as to allow the companies to pick them according to their brand identity color. Importantly, you will find them to be the most effective for spreading your corporate message across the customers.

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In our recent blog, we discussed a unique initiative by Hindustan Unilever for all its employees. The company has set certain parameters that are meticulously measured, and a score is given to each employee on a vitality index score card.

The lower is the score, the better is an employee’s vitality;  a score of 0 to 4 puts the employee concerned in the green zone, a score of 5 to 6 slots one in the amber zone and a 7 plus score puts one in the red zone. Each employee is informed about his/her personal vitality score/color zone in a confidential manner.

Such relation building programs are a big boost to the employees’ morale and far more gainful than mere monetary rewards and incentives.  Of course, these measures succeed only if there’s a buy-in at the top! The top management committee ensured this. Another challenge was to create a buzz around the initiative. Mailers and posters like ‘Do you see red every time you see a staircase?’, or ‘Cool as a cucumber about your health? Don’t wait till it becomes red-hot’ were circulated.

In the next stage, employees were prompted to improve their vitality scores by conducting workshops  across the company’s different locations, through events such as Family Day, Walkathons, Vitality Exhibitions, nutritional menu counseling etc. Interactive sessions were held to teach the employees about the concept of BMI, ways of improving lifestyle, healthy diet to avoid/reduce weight gain as well as proper exercises for weight management.

The focus has been on scientific exercise methods, correct practical nutritional advice, and stress management techniques. The aim is to create health awareness so as to attain better fitness levels and enhanced lifestyle patterns. Workshops are conducted on post-retirement health planning for managers. At a basic level, the vitality index project reflects common sense: The healthier your employees, the more likely they’re to be (efficient) at work.

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Employers looking to incentivize their employees need not only consider gifts and monetary rewards. There are so many other steps and ideas that they can initiate to strike a rapport with their workforce. 

A case in point is Hindustan Unilever’s recent health initiative for its 15,000 strong team. The program is reaping great rewards. Shyamal Majumdar in an interesting article entitled ‘What’s your vitality index?’ that appeared in The Business Standard gave an insight into the initiative.

Based on an interview with T Rajgopal, HUL vice-president (Medical and Occupational Health), the writer threw light on the employee-driven incentive program at arguably India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company.

Rajgopal and his team have indeed been able to implement a ‘personal vitality’ initiative in a phased manner for the employees of HUL in India. The health plan is ahead of the curve and hence is getting a favorable response from the company employees.

Underlining the importance of the move, the article pointed out: “What employees are doing at lunch and also after work can greatly affect their employer. HUL can consider the rewards-ratio of many other global firms that have implemented well-thought-out health plans for their employees. The ratio for Johnson & Johnson is 3.8:1. The same for Pepsico, Motorola and Dupont is equally healthy.

“We are providing employees the encouragement and the necessary tools to change unhealthy lifestyles before these transform into chronic diseases. We do it in a fun way that also allows them to choose the path, which fits them best,” stated Rajgopal.

At the heart of the new HUL initiative is a vitality index - the measurement of the personal vitality of every individual employee. It is based on four parameters - blood pressure, blood cholesterol, the Body Mass Index (BMI), and blood sugar.

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As we checked in the previous blog post, gold ETFs are very much similar to a diversified mutual fund plan. Instead of investing the corpus in equity, the money is invested in gold. We learnt about gold ETF schemes on offer from UTI, Quantum, SBI mutual fund, Kotak and Reliance.

Just to elaborate and simplify the concept further, ETFs are essentially mutual funds that are listed on the stock exchange. Here, the underlying core asset is standard gold bullion. You can use this instrument to buy gold bullion on someone else’s behalf, and present a meaningful gift. Corporates can consider gifting them to their employees as well.

Let us check the various features of gold ETFs and how they are managed:
• As for denomination, one can buy even one gram at a time. With Quantum, you can purchase half-a-gram at one time.

• When one wants to sell back the gold in physical form, the making charges of jewelry are wasted as they cannot be recovered. In fact, the gold in physical form is mostly sold at a discount to its original price owing to depreciation. Coins and bars suffer from similar issues. On the other hand, units of gold ETFs can be sold by either with a few clicks in case you have an online trading account or by a call to your broker.

• Tax benefits is one major advantage of gifting gold in the electronic form. It’s free of wealth tax. It attracts just 10% long-term capital gains tax as against 20% in case of physical gold.

• Again, there is absolutely no doubt on the count of purity because impurity risk is non-existent with gold ETF. This can be an issue with the gold in physical form

• Security is of course taken care of by the fund, unlike in the case of jewelry or other forms of physical gold where the threat of theft always looms.

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It is important to determine your budget first to get a clear understanding of your corporate gift program. Once you set your budget and scope, next you should define the exact purpose of giveaways.  This will depend on what domain you are and your end user.  Your budget will though, will largely dictate how much you should allocate for the gifting program.

When deciding how much to spend, key thing to take into account is the intrinsic value of your business relationship. Based on it, you should make sure you give an ‘appropriate’ gift. Also, consider specific guidelines of that corporate entity and industry. You would never want it to appear as a favor.

Just reverse the roles. What if you receive an over-expensive gift? Talk to the giver in person if you think that the gift is too costly, too personal or not really suitable to the occasion or the relationship you share with the person. However, never discuss these things in public with the person concerned.

Corporate gifts can serve various roles like Thank You gifts for clients and colleagues; motivational gifts; recognition gifts for employees; new client acquisition; retention of business clients; building brand awareness; promotional products; holiday gifts for clients; trade show giveaways; premiums incentives and incentive programs; award programs; advertising specialties; service and safety awards; and general purpose business gifts and awards.

One discreet way to place your logo is leather portfolios. It is normally de-bossed on the cover. Some people prefer to customize with the recipients initials. If you believe you have selected a gift that will make a lasting impression on the recipient, there is absolutely no need to place your logo on the gift. The person will remember you by the gorgeous gift itself.  Also work out how you will distribute it - in person or by courier mail.

Tags: Best corporate gifts, gifting to clients, promotional products, Business Gifting
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While chalking out a corporate gifting plan, it is important to understand the entire chain from the perspective of a vendor. In fact, it becomes imperative for a vendor to realize the dynamics of corporate gifting process and its objectives in the backdrop of diverse organizational cultures as well as the mindset of target audience.

This is necessary for devising a holistic gifting plan. A vendor should understand the main purpose or the motive of gifting by a particular organization. It may be a voluntary exercise or one devised for a specific occasion. Let’s now look at some of the key factors, which need to be considered:

Creating a favorable company or brand image
Corporate gifting may be undertaken for creating a favorable company or brand image in the minds of its existing/prospective clients or stakeholders. On basis of a peculiar scenario, a vendor/ manufacturer can make certain assumptions regarding the logistics and scale of the exercise.

For example, the gift items cannot be probably too costly if the recipients are going to be large in number. If the target audience possesses focused domain knowledge; one can give something, which would assist the receiver in his/her work.
Ideally, it should be something meaningful as stakeholders are evangelists of the company in question.

Taking into account ‘Theme’ and the ‘Occasion’
It is so very important to take into account the ‘Occasion’ and the allied ‘Theme’ for working out a gift plan. Creative ideas are most warranted when it comes to the ‘occasion’ and core ‘theme’ of gifting to employees, trade partners and clients.

It becomes highly imperative for the vendor to come up with innovative themes that will sum up the broad corporate identity, within the gamut of gifting to jell with the occasion. Timing is another critical factor to successfully execute the corporate gifting exercise.

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A successful organisation thrives on high-performance, dynamic culture. The key is to build a base of people, at all levels that will critically scrutinize their own practices and voluntarily ask themselves if they are doing all they can to their full potential. The mindset needs to be changed, though! But how to make this happen, you must be wondering! This is where gift certificates come into play.

If you want to encourage loyal and hard working employees and are keen to hold onto them, you need to increase their motivation levels and learn to recognize performance with timely presents like gift certificates.

You may consider the following types of incentives and rewards for your employees:

• Create an attractive incentive structure. For example, give an opportunity to your employees to win a gift certificate equaling a certain percentage of their total sales achieved.
• Set up a ‘points’ ladder, which allows them to win certificates of higher value for increased levels of sales.
• Offer gift cards as part of yearly bonus rewards plans so all team members will encourage each other to improve their productivity. For instance, announce that the team that records the most sales, manages to get the highest customer satisfaction index rating, and completes the most projects on time will get large denominations of gift certificates to the store of their choice.
• Award gift certificates to those employees who exhibit effective leadership skills, brainstorm outstanding solutions on key projects, go an extra mile to help a co-worker or come up with a money saving strategy for the company.

The random nature of the giveaways will sure motivate the staff to contribute valuable inputs to its growth.

Let the employees select what gift certificate they want to keep from a variety of gift cards options from bookstores, music stores, shopping malls or restaurants.

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