We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Whitaker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.

Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?

Showing appreciation is the business I am in. When we make branded merchandise for our clients, we ask them to consider the recipient, and share some information about the recipient with us before we make merchandise recommendations for them. To us, a successful promotional product purchase is when the client makes an impact on the end recipient. It simply has better return for our client. The brands that are growing the most are those we invite in to our lives, the ones that reflect our values, the ones that just “get” us. We as consumers want to represent those brands, we want to associate with those companies, and we’re showing our support by being customers of those brands. It’s important when a company is showing appreciation to its customers, they feel seen and their experience is personalized. When it comes to sending a thank you, all of that comes in to play. We had one client who decided to gift a whole boxed experience to their clients during their clients’ busiest season, sending curated gifts with snacks, coffee, etc. and making it designed solely around supporting them in their busy time, and oh by the way it’s from us – subtle branding, big impact. We had another client that simply sent a well-designed item (unbranded, actually, but totally custom designed and unique to them!) celebrating an important milestone for the recipients. The best appreciation gestures are done in a customer-centric way, and there is certainly a time and a place for advertising, but during a moment of thanks it’s all about the recipient and the thoughtfulness and impact of the gift.

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My background is in corporate marketing. I was on the buying side of promotional items, among many other marketing tasks. In 2015, I told my grandfather I wanted to start a marketing agency in my hometown and that I would just join him in his office – he had an “ad specialties” company. Once I joined, he started teaching me about the promotional products side of things. Branded merch just fits so nicely within the overall marketing mix when considered as the full channel that it is, and so I became more and more intrigued with that side of the business. In 2018 I became an owner in the company (Williams Advertising). A few years later, I spun off a dedicated Branded division of the company so that the traditional marketing services side of the business where we handle things like content marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, and design is one, and then we now have a more dedicated space for the branded merchandise division. There is so much to cover within the branded merchandise space as a marketing channel, we decided we needed a dedicated home (thebrandedthings.com) to really dive in to the possibilities.

Promotional products can be just logos loud & slapped on random items – but that’s not the business we try to do. We are intentional about design, we come with creative solutions, we mirror your brand values in the merch we suggest. That’s not the traditional experience, or the DIY transactional experience. We’re truly a creative product marketing agency. We’re way more consultative than e-commerce because we’re product & positioning experts. Our clients tell us they come to us when they need something creative or want something special, and that’s exactly the kind of resource we want to be.

The main thing I’d want to convey to a potential client is we only want to work with you on things that will impact your growth. I don’t want to sell you just anything, in fact I would rather not sell you a product if it’s not going to help you in some way reach your goals. I wouldn’t advise you to do a digital marketing campaign if you weren’t going to have the return you want; why would I suggest a product that wouldn’t have impact? I want to help you create something amazing, something people will love, something they’ll keep, they’ll use, that will be memorable, that helps associate your company or brand with a strong emotion with your recipient. That’s what really brings us joy when we’re working with our clients, truly, and who doesn’t want to do the thing they love to do every day?

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Referrals! Happy customers are the best source of new clients for us. We work really hard to make sure we give a great experience, and the best compliment to us is when a happy customer intro’s us to someone else they think could benefit from working with us.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

So many books have impacted the way I think, and I love reading different points of view – we don’t know what we don’t know! RocketFuel and Traction (Gino Wickman) reframed how I break down big goals and make them attainable. I just finished The 10X Rule (Grant Cardone) and it’s got me thinking the goals in that framework aren’t quite big enough (!). The Focus Effect (Greg Wells & Bruce Bowser) disrupted how I think about time. Lunch with Lucy (Sherry Stewart Deutschmann) is a great take on getting team engagement with your goals. What If There’s More (Traci Schubert Barrett) I recently finished & it definitely got me thinking – it’s a good book with good takeaways & to do’s. The Magic of Thinking Big (David Schwartz) is another I just read last month that’s had a huge impact on where we’re heading.

Contact Info:

• Website: thebrandedthings.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/brandedbywilliams
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahwhitaker/