Branded merchandise has always had a simple promise: Put a brand in someone’s hands and it’s more likely to stay in their life. However, in recent years, expectations for branded merch have shifted. PPAI Research surveyed more than 500 firms and business professionals across two targeted audiences: 257 end buyer respondents and 250 agency respondents.
- The end buyer group represented senior decision-makers and influencers at sizable organizations involved in marketing, branding, events, employee engagement, customer retention, procurement and branded merchandise decisions.
- The agency group represented marketing, advertising, media, PR, event, experiential, creative, digital, research and brand strategy firms whose professionals lead or influence client campaign recommendations.
Together, these two audiences provide a practical view of the market: how organizations use branded merch inside their own programs and how agencies evaluate it when advising clients on broader campaign strategy.
“The market isn’t asking for less branded merchandise,” says Alok Bhat, market economist, director of research and public affairs at PPAI. “It’s asking for better branded merchandise – better strategy, better quality, better execution and better proof.”
Alok Bhat
Director of Research & Public Affairs, PPAI
For distributors and suppliers, that creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that buyers and agencies are raising their expectations. The opportunity is that the industry has a clear path to move from product fulfillment to campaign value.
The Product Is The Brand Experience
In branded merch, the product is the delivery vehicle for the brand as well as the brand experience. That matters because recipients judge the brand through the item itself. A high-quality, useful product can extend the life of a campaign. A low-quality or irrelevant product can do the opposite. End buyers in the survey were clear about what makes branded merch worth keeping. Nearly 8 out of 10 end buyers (79%) selected high quality as a reason a branded product is worth keeping. Usefulness in daily life followed at 47%, while good design was close behind at 46%.
These findings show that buyers aren’t thinking only in terms of cost or distribution. They’re also focused on whether the item earns a place in someone’s routine. Becoming a part of someone’s daily life is what makes merch stand out against digital ads, emails and other marketing tools. A well-made and useful product can stay in someone’s routine for years, while an email might get archived in seconds. However, not all merch sticks around. When end buyers were asked what causes people to discard it, 59% pointed to poor quality. More than one-third (37%) said items are discarded because they aren’t useful, 36% said they’re irrelevant to the audience, and 32% cited poor design.
That’s a direct message to the industry – product quality is a marketing performance issue. If a product feels cheap, poorly designed or irrelevant, the campaign loses one of the strongest advantages merch can offer: staying power. For suppliers, this reinforces the importance of quality control, product innovation, inventory reliability and production speed. For distributors, it strengthens the case for guiding clients away from generic choices and toward products that fit the audience, the moment and the objective.
Strategy Before Selection
The traditional product conversation often starts with a familiar question: What item do you want?
The better question is: What are you trying to achieve?
The survey suggests that buyers want distributors and partners to move earlier into the planning process. When end buyers were asked what would make a distributor or vendor partner more valuable, the top response (49%) was better strategic ideas. Better pricing transparency followed closely at 45%, while 36% selected faster quotes and samples and 30% selected product trend guidance.
In other words, buyers aren’t only asking for someone to source products. They’re asking for help making better decisions before the order is placed.
This is especially important because merch is used for many different goals. In the survey, 54% of end buyers said the primary purpose of their organization’s merch usage is brand awareness. Customer retention or loyalty, employee engagement, events and sales prospecting also appeared as use cases, but brand awareness was the dominant purpose.
All of these goals should be approached in a different way. Each has a different audience, different moment and different definition of success.
In every scenario, the product matters – but the intention and strategy matter more.
This knowledge creates an opportunity for the industry to shift the conversation from “Which product?” to “Why this product for this audience at this moment?”
Buyers And Agencies Value Different Strengths
One of the most useful findings from the study is that end buyers and agencies don’t describe the value of merch in the same way.
End buyers were most likely to say merch is best at creating customer appreciation (62%). Brand recall or staying power followed at 58%, trust or credibility at 53% and likeability at 46%.
Agencies, by contrast, leaned more toward the emotional and experiential side of the channel. When asked what merch is best at creating for clients, agencies selected emotional connection (40%), sense of community (38%), customer appreciation (36%) and likeability (35%).
This distinction matters. End buyers appear to see merch as a practical brand tool, supporting appreciation, recall, trust and customer relationships. Meanwhile, agencies appear to see it more as an engagement tool, creating connection, community and emotional response.
Both views are valuable. Together, they suggest that the strongest merch programs sit at the intersection of practical business value and emotional brand experience.
Agencies Need Campaign-Ready Thinking
Agencies often think in terms of campaign architecture: audience, channel mix, creative concept, timing, budget, measurement and client approval. In order for merch to earn more consistent consideration in that environment, it needs to be easier to bring into campaign planning.
The survey found that agencies want resources such as campaign use case examples (44%), product trend reports (41%), audience persona guides (40%), budget planning tools (33%) and ROI or measurement examples (29%).
Therefore, it’s important to consider planning capabilities rather than just expanding your catalog. Agencies need campaign-ready ideas they can take into client conversations and examples that show how merch works alongside events, digital campaigns, sales outreach, employee engagement, community activations or loyalty programs.
Additionally, agencies value speed. When agencies were asked what would make distributors more valuable, faster quotes and samples led the list at 51%, followed by more product trend guidance and client-ready concepts (tied at 37%) and clearer pricing (34%).
The path forward is for the merch industry to show up in a format agencies already understand: concepts, use cases, audience logic, budget ranges, timelines and proof.
Supplier Is Now A Marketing Issue
Suppliers have always been central to product quality, decoration, availability and delivery. But the survey suggests those capabilities are increasingly tied to how buyers and agencies judge the effectiveness of merch overall.
End buyers said supplier capabilities that would most improve their merch experience include better quality control (57%), better product innovation (48%), faster production (43%) and more reliable inventory (38%).
Agencies prioritized a slightly different mix. Faster production and more sustainable products were both selected by 43% of agency respondents, followed closely by more reliable inventory (41%) and better quality control (32%).
Differences aside, both end buyers and agencies value reliability.
If a product is out of stock, substituted unexpectedly, delayed in production or inconsistent in quality, the impact can affect the campaign, the client relationship and the perceived value of the channel itself.
Suppliers that help reduce uncertainty will create value beyond the product. That may mean better inventory visibility, clearer product data, stronger quality assurance, faster production timelines, more reliable decoration, better packaging and fulfillment support and clearer sustainability or compliance information.
Product innovation also matters, but innovation shouldn’t be defined only as adding more SKUs. The more meaningful innovation is solving buyer and agency problems. By adding products that people actually want to keep, fit modern brand expectations, support sustainability goals and can be produced and delivered with confidence, merch firms will be able to deliver what agencies and end buyers truly want.
Measurements Are More Important Than Ever
The merch industry has long understood the power of physical brand connection. But marketers increasingly operate in environments where budgets must be defended, channels must be compared and campaign impact must be explained.
That doesn’t mean merch should be measured exactly like paid search, email or programmatic advertising. It just means that the industry needs a clearer measurement language.
End buyers are already measuring a range of outcomes. The most common were spendings or budget (53%), leads generated (49%), impressions or reach (48)%, event engagement (47%), customer retention (40%) and sales influenced (39%). Only 1% said they don’t measure branded merchandise at all.
When asked which outcomes they would most like to measure better, 55% selected ROI, 37% selected customer retention, 36% selected sales influenced and 35% selected cost per lead.
When agencies were asked what would make a branded merchandise ROI calculator useful, 46% selected clear assumptions, 44% selected benchmark data, 38% selected conservative and optimistic scenarios and 37% selected campaign templates.
When asked which ROI calculator output clients would trust most, agencies selected cost per meeting (27%), followed by cost per lead (26%), cost per impression (19%) and ROI percentage (14%). That suggests the most credible ROI conversation may start with transparent assumptions and practical metrics buyers already understand.
“The next phase for branded merchandise isn’t just proving that it works,” Bhat says. “It’s building a clearer language for how it works through recall, appreciation, engagement, retention, lead quality and measurable campaign outcomes.”
For distributors, this means discussing measurements before the campaign launches, not after the invoice.
What should success look like? Is the goal awareness, engagement, meetings, leads, loyalty, employee connection or retention? What can realistically be tracked? What assumptions are being made? These questions will help get the ball rolling before the campaign even starts, enabling you to proceed with clearer vision.
AI Can Help, But It Shouldn’t Replace Judgment
Survey results also suggest that buyers see AI as useful in several practical areas.
End buyers said AI could improve branded merchandise planning or procurement by finding better product ideas (41%), estimating ROI or campaign impact (39%), matching products to audience personas and improving budget planning (33%) and personalizing campaigns (32%).
Agencies see similar potential, but with a stronger emphasis on campaign development. They said AI could help most by building campaign concepts (44%), personalizing merch programs (37%), matching products to audience personas (37%), estimating ROI or impact (35%) and improving budget planning (29%).
Used well, AI could help a distributor move faster from a vague request to a sharper recommendation. It could help match products to audience segments, suggest campaign concepts, compare budget scenarios, identify sustainable options, flag potential compliance concerns or generate client-ready presentation drafts.
But AI won’t solve the industry’s most important problems by itself.
Agencies also expressed concerns about AI, including lack of human creativity (28%), data privacy (23%), accuracy of recommendations (17%) and brand safety (12%).
The companies that benefit most from AI will likely be those that combine technology with better discovery questions, stronger product knowledge and clearer campaign thinking. “AI can help the industry move faster, but it shouldn’t replace human judgment,” Bhat says. “The real value is using technology to improve product fit, personalization, budget planning and measurement.”
What Winners Will Do Differently
The survey findings point toward a simple but important conclusion: Branded merchandise has a strong future, but the winning playbook is changing.
For distributors, the advantage will come from moving upstream. The strongest partners will help clients define the audience, clarify the business objective, choose products with purpose, understand pricing tradeoffs, move quickly through quotes and samples and think about measurements before the campaign begins.
For suppliers, the advantage will come from reducing friction and risk. That means better quality control, reliable inventory, faster production, stronger customization, clearer sustainability and compliance information and product innovation that reflects how brands actually use merchandise today.
For agencies, the opportunity is to treat branded merchandise as part of campaign design rather than a final-stage add-on. That requires stronger examples, better proof, clearer use cases and easier collaboration with distributors and suppliers.
The common thread is value.
Brookshire is associate editor at PPAI.
