Corporate gifting
that gets kept.

Corporate gifting is one of the few marketing expenses that arrives in somebody's hands. It is also one of the few where the recipient can tell, immediately and precisely, how much thought went into it.

That is the uncomfortable part. A gift communicates the sender's judgement whether or not the sender intended it to. A hamper of supermarket items in cellophane says something. So does a bottle with a card that spells the recipient's name correctly and refers to something that actually happened during the year.

What makes a gift forgettable

• It is obviously a catalogue item, ordered in a quantity
• The branding is the loudest thing in the box
• It arrives in the second week of December, with everyone else's
• The card is printed, unsigned, and addressed to a company rather than a person
• It contains things the recipient would not buy and will not use

None of these are failures of budget. A modest gift chosen with attention outperforms an expensive one chosen from a list, every time, and the recipient can tell the difference in about four seconds.

Three things that change the outcome

Timing. A gift that arrives in the first week of December is opened, noticed and talked about. The same gift arriving on the twentieth joins a pile. Earlier is almost always better, and for some relationships a gift that arrives in March for no reason at all lands harder than anything sent at Christmas.

Specificity. The difference between a good gift and a forgettable one is usually a single detail that could only apply to that person. It does not have to be elaborate. It has to be true.

Presentation. What the gift arrives in is read before the gift itself. Weight, texture, the sound the lid makes, whether the ribbon is tied or stapled. These register before anyone has seen what is inside, and they set the frame for everything that follows.

A note on scale

The objection to all of this is that it does not scale, and at a certain volume that is true. But most Australian businesses are not sending a thousand gifts. They are sending between twenty and two hundred, to people whose names they know, and at that scale attention is entirely possible. It is usually a question of starting in September rather than December.

What to decide first

Before choosing anything, settle who the list is actually for. A gift to a client who has spent six figures and a gift to a referral partner who sent one introduction are different gifts, and treating them identically is noticed by both.

Then decide what the gift is for. Thanking someone for the year, marking a specific moment, and staying visible into the next quarter are three different objectives, and each one produces a different gift. Most gifting goes wrong because that question was never asked.

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GD Events Group is a Sydney practice for the design of strategic experiences — corporate events, hosted environments and gifting, curated journeys and strategic experience programs. About the practice.