Promotional products are used by businesses to increase awareness of brand names, to provide incentives for customers to make purchases, and to influence how customers view a business or brand. By providing promotional products for customers businesses significantly increase the visibility of their brand which in turn increases the frequency by which a customer thinks about a brand. The more a customer thinks about a brand the more likely they are to make a purchase in the future or to consider making such future purchases, and to develop brand loyalty.

When competitors hand out promotional products it becomes a necessity to compete with the dispersal of free merchandise or potentially risk losing business and relative brand awareness. In addition, a company that provides customers with free products appears to be profitable and stable due to the fact that it requires an extra effort and investment to provide promotional products. This demonstrates to the customer that not only does the company already provide quality products but it is profitable and a trustable brand. This, and the resulting brand loyalty, is the ultimate goal of advertising with promotional products.

Providing a customer with a free pen which they see every day when they use it is much cheaper than buying advertising time on television or space on highway billboards, and the customer will likely see the pen more often than a billboard and take more notice of the brand emblazoned on it. The pen is more useful to the customer than a television commercial so more positive feelings are likely to be associated with it, which is a significant advantage over television and billboard advertising.  In associating the positive quality of usefulness with the promotional product, the customer may also associate positive feeling with the brand associated with it, your brand, by association.

Providing customers with promotional products tells the customer that a company pays attention to a customer and his or her interests and needs. It shows the customer that the company or business is very much interested in pleasing the customer and providing them with their product, a feeling customers are likely to respond positively to.

All in all, there are significant advantages to advertising by providing the customer with a promotional product such as pen, plastic drink bottle or calculator. Promotional products send the message to the customer that your business is profitable, stable, and that you care about their feelings. Advertising via promotional products has the additional benefit of being much cheaper than television or billboard advertising and having a much longer duration than thirty seconds of television air time or a brief glimpse of a billboard on the highway. The positive feelings customers come to associate with your promotional product due to its usefulness and frequency of remembrance of the brand name of your product far outreaches the benefits of other avenues of advertising. Promotional products are clearly a more efficient, affordable and effective means of advertising for your business.