Local Gift Boxes: Case Study

Name: Southwest Solutions
Price range: $$

Promoting your brand and fostering relationships are important business features that no company can afford to ignore! Regardless of their success, companies with regular customers still need to find new and creative ways to maintain customer engagement, brand awareness, and their strong reputation.

This is where providing artfully curated gift boxes come in. Whether you are looking for custom executive gifts or employee swag gifts or just something to say thank you for your business, gift boxes say a lot without costing a ton. Gift boxes procured and kitted by Southwest Solutions combine local Tucson products and for this example, can include items like; artisanal popcorn, a bottle of wine from a local vineyard, two reusable double-wall wine tumblers, a logoed bag, wine accessories sets, and a nuts snack box of locally grown pecans!

This case study will show the success you can have by using curated gift boxes with a combination of local items and branded items.

Target Audience

Needless to say, anyone - prospects or current clients - would love to receive one of these beautiful gifts. However, they tend to have the greatest impact on existing customers. From a business standpoint, the target audiences that will benefit substantially from these are businesses with a powerful brand name and loyal customers. These are those customers that support you continuously throughout your business life. Naturally, you believe you’re the best at what you do- otherwise, you’d be in business doing something else- but gift boxes like these set you apart even more from your competition by showing your customers that you care about their presence beyond just the transactional nature of business.

Local Gift Box Goals

The primary goal of a gift box is to improve the relationship between existing customers and your company. Gift boxes make customers feel appreciated and add a personal touch to your advertising efforts. This special effort will form a genuine bond between you and your customers.

As with any promotional product, the true purpose of these gifts is to elicit an emotional reaction (the “ooh!” moment).

Bear in mind that if you’re giving these gifts at the end of the year, you need to make sure your gift stands out. More thought (and not necessarily more money) needs to be put into the gift if you want to clinch the Wow! factor. When we achieve that Wow! factor, the thank yous you get from your customers will tell you right away that you hit the nail on the head.

Program Theme

For the first time ever, the attorney clients we built this gift program for were looking to move beyond the old-school food gift basket. They had been sending the same kind of food basket for years. They realized they were at the very least missing out on the potential of including branded goodies in their holiday gifts - let alone missing the Wow! factor.

They came to us wanting to put something classy together - something that honors Tucson, but also reflects back on the law firm positively and confidently. We landed on gift boxes with locally sourced products and customized, unique promo goodies for their customers.

Custom Gift Boxes Results

Our client that sent these gift boxes was overwhelmed by the positive response from their clients. They received - for the first time - numerous handwritten thank you cards, gushing over the gifts and how stunning they were. These local gift boxes make the customers feel special, and it makes them feel like the company truly values them and their business. ‏

One client wrote “Wow!! Thank you for the most impressive and delicious gift. Absolute class personified!!” Another remarked “Again - WOW!!! P.S. I refer clients to you because you are the epitome of competence, depth of knowledge, & professionalism!!!”

Seeing as gift boxes are an example of indirect marketing, customers that receive a gift box are more likely to share the news and promote the company via word of mouth. However, with the presence of social media, there is now the possibility that customers may post their gift baskets on social media, meaning that persons who may have never heard about your brand and company before are now seeing it on their timelines- potential new customers for you! ‏

Promotional Local Gift Boxes Marketing

Businesses that have partnered with Southwest Solutions to provide custom gift boxes, like the one above, create and maintain strong brand awareness, ensuring their company name is always at the forefront of their customers’ minds.

Plus, these gift boxes and their contents can be achieved on a variety of budgets and are customizable to suit each of your clients’ and your own needs.

So, what are you waiting for? Get in contact with us and we'll get brainstorming on how to please your clients!

Got Questions?

Until next time,

Vera Minot

Vera is a creative-minded, heart-first promotional products (and print/apparel/direct mail/signage/etc.) professional who approaches all aspects of life with intention and enthusiasm. Vera is passionate about vocabulary, self-care, and authenticity (even in business!), and in her free time you’ll probably find her rock climbing or mountain biking, growing things, cooking, reading, and generally finding ways to get up to no good with her wife, Christa.

Custom Award Pins: A Rock Solid Case Study

For a new rock climbing gym building their client base, creating an engaging challenge with recognizable rewards was a key step in building their climber loyalty and engagement. At Southwest Solutions, we helped Rock Solid brainstorm giveaways that were worthwhile awards for their challenge and landed on custom award pins. These pin badges represented the climbing circuit completed (by color) and their facility, by keeping the design the very recognizable graphic piece of their logo.

Creating a climbing community takes investment and one of the most successful investments we have made in that avenue has been the Circuit Session event.

A huge part of that success is due to the custom award pin badges we gave away as rewards for completion of a circuit. These pins represented a few dollars invested but the community response to them was worth far more to our business.

-Cory Hanson, General Manager

Target Audience

Rock Solid Climbing set out to attract all current gym members and prospective members who are looking to make climbing a more consistent part of their routine.

Our promotional strategy to create excitement for the event utilized word-of-mouth, social media, and email marketing. With excitement drummed up through this outreach messaging, the concept of a climbing circuit was injected into their community.

They then distributed a few pins to select individuals that hold respect within the climbing community. After all that, you better believe people started to take notice. The custom award pins became a hot topic within Rock Solid.

Custom Award Pin Goals

This custom award pin program set out to create a community-building, give-back event that promoted one of the pillars of their brand: their circuit style of route setting. The event had to focus on this aspect of their facility, motivate participants to partake in the event, and reward all ability and experience levels in the climbing community.

To accomplish this, we needed to provide participants something tangible and recognizable from the event to stoke future participation, membership attendance, and loyalty.

We toyed with various ways to define 'mastery' and settled on the challenge of climbing all of the routes in a color-defined circuit within an hour. If accomplished, the climber is awarded a custom Rock Solid Circuit Award pin.

Program Theme

The pins would ultimately be a way to show pride about one's ability and allegiance to the facility, and because they match the way the climbing routes are leveled in the gym, anyone who sees them can tell at a quick glance what level of a climber that person is. Ex: if you see a climber with a red pin badge, you know that person is an incredible climber.

At the events (there were three, each time focusing on a different set of colors AKA levels), climbers looking to earn their custom award pins gathered at a particular time, were given maps of the routes in the facility, and were released to the circuits!

custom awards pins badges southwest solutions

Custom Award Pin Results

The custom award pins achieved their planned goal and more to create a community-building event. Don't just take it from us- take it from the guy who ordered our custom promotional items!

"Participants were engaged by the event's structure but they were also enamored with the reward and it's hard to blame them with how amazing they turned out! Some members and guests returned up to 3 times in a single week in pursuit of their next badge. Our social media was flooded with imagery of the badges. We had people travel from up to 3 hours away to participate and earn badges!

These components build our credentials in the climbing community. This event showed our community that we are thinking outside of the box to inspire members towards new goals in the facility. It showed our community that we care about more than just replicating the patterns of our predecessors. Moving forward we expect people to pay more attention to events that we put on. We expect higher participation rates but more importantly, we expect our community to feel a little more at home when they are in our facility." -Cory Hanson, General Manager

2021 PPAI Golden Pyramid Finalist: Promotional Strategy

This promotional strategy was not without its own set of press coverage for Southwest Solutions. These custom award pins were recognized as a finalist in the 2021 Promotional Products Association International Golden Pyramid Program. If you're looking to work with an award-winning promotional product supplier, get in touch today!

2021 promotional product association international golden pyramid finalist