Promotional products can include near any number of items you can think of, and branded with a logo, used in marketing campaigns and communication programs. These items are then given away to promote a company or brand.

Corporate Image and even Events are highlighted and promoted, by imprinting the name, logo or slogan of the company on the promotional gifts. Usually an event, conference or a trade show can serve as a platform for this marketing strategy known as guerilla marketing.

The marketing industry dates back just over 200 years, with the first known promotional items being the commemorative buttons serving the presidential election of George Washington in 1789. From the early 1800′s there were a handful of items used for promotion, yet it was not until the 1900′s that an organized industry existed for the creation and distribution of promotional products.

A man named Jasper Meeks, said by many to be the father of this industry. Convincing a shoe store to print book bags with their name on it, and giving it to the local schools in Ohio, it was not long until Henry Beach, another local from Ohio, started the same idea.

By 1904, it had happened that the 12 manufacturing companies of promo products came together and established the first trade association of the industry. Known today as the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), fifty years on from then only, the industry formally became known as Corporate Marketing.

These type of products would only see a real boom in its industry from the 1970 onward, when corporate entities began to realize the usefulness of promoting their products, brands and corporate entities by giving away the gifts, sporting their logo on it.

Now well after 2000, the industry has grown globally, shipping an endless list of items being anything from T-shirts, key holders, pens, bumper stickers and peak-caps to a host of relatively inexpensive promo products. The UK and Ireland still the center of the supply chain, even after the dawn of online trading.

Promotional products usually follow a strategic business initiative with brand awareness being the most common use of marketing gifts. Another strategy is to employ more expensive gifts, like designer handbags, perfumes or the latest stylish cell phone. Giving it to a celebrity guest for an award show or film festival, often in exchange for a picture of the celebrity with the marketed logo, hopefully raising publicity for the promoted logo or brand name.

Often used by non-commercial organizations also, like schools and charities, it can be an effective marketing product, promoting causes and growing support for awareness-raising campaigns, like in the case of cancer and the fight against woman and child abuse. Rubber wristbands and colored ribbons has become synonymous with such causes globally, serving to show just how sophisticated and developed the use of small inexpensive gifts as promotional products, has grown to become.

With recent studies completed in 2008, the publication has come to show the UK and Ireland promotion product industry, to be worth just over 850 million sterling pounds and growing. The fastest growing product at the end of 2009, being a hand sanitizer was coincidental with the swine flu scare at the time.