The extensive education opportunities available at The PPAI Expo and The PPAI Expo Conference are an invaluable resource for professionals in the promotional products industry looking for new, fresh ideas to move their careers and businesses forward. Innovative thinking shared at The PPAI Expo Conference in 2023 presented several intriguing, beneficial concepts that attendees can apply at their own companies.

Customer First

Customer experience can be everything for a business. Customer experience, sometimes termed “CX,” is the holistic perception of a customer’s experience with a business or brand. In their session, “Customer Experience – What Does It Mean In The Promotional Products Industry,” Laura Turner, vice president of customer experience at alphabroder, and Amy McCray, vice president of Eskimo Joe’s Promotional Products Group, shared how industry professionals can map the customer journey within their own organization and apply CX practices at their business.

Companies emphasizing CX are listening to their customers, measuring their satisfaction and improving their experience along the way. Turner and McCray note that CX is “the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product or service they bought from you.”

Data from Qualtrics XM showed investing in CX can potentially increase revenue by 70% in 36 months as it reduces the costs of retaining customers while simultaneously increasing the amount they’re willing to spend with a company.

Build A Better Box

Great design can sell a product, tell a story and build a business. In his breakout session “The Art of Wickedly Creative Product Design, Packaging, and First Impressions,” Jason Lucash, co-founder of Origaudio and former chief development officer for HPG, shared how innovative, well-thought-out design spurred growth and opportunities.

“In an industry where first impressions matter the most, we’ve always wanted to up the standard by ensuring our customers have the best possible competitive advantage when walking into a client’s office. We are marketing our products to creatives so the standard simply was never good enough for us.”

Great design ideas can come from anywhere, so always be on the lookout. Lucash shared how travel, a trip to the store and even surfing the web have inspired new products and approaches to packaging.

Meet Each Generation Where They Are

When it comes to generations in the marketplace, one size doesn’t fit all. Vicki Ostrom, a futurist and trend editor for supplier SanMar, spoke in her session “Do You Know Me? A Generations Game Connecting People to Product,” on how to reach each generation – from Gen Z to what she termed Generation Ageless – by recognizing what drives them and how to connect with them.

Ostrom’s session looked at how technology and economics are influencing each unique generation. All of them are in search of community, in one way or the other. She also identified several common themes that every generation shares for 2023:

  • Nostalgia
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Health

She also showed how more finely defining different generations – moving from the standard 20-year generation to overlapping “micro generations” of six-year spans – can more accurately target and meet the needs of a group.

  • Between Gen Z and Millennials are the Zennials and between Millennials and Gen X are the Xennials, and so on.

Know Your Employees To Engage Your Employees

The pandemic has changed a lot about life, work and how people interact. A conscious effort to understand and address employees’ evolving needs can create a motivated, engaged workforce. Kate Alavez, chief operating officer at PromoShop, Inc., and Erin Reilly, CEO of Pop! Promos, in their session “Unlocking Engagement: Smart Strategies To Create Motivated, High-Performance Connections” spoke on creating and engaging high-performing teams, improving communication and the power of effective motivation.

According to Alavez and Reilly, employees expect their jobs to give them a significant sense of purpose, and “Employers need to help meet this need or be prepared to lose talent to companies that will.”

Alavez and Reilly encourage companies to adopt policies emphasizing flexibility at work – not to say that they should lower their standards, just modify their operations to allow a flexible option. This sort of mindfulness can pays dividends in meeting employees’ physiological and other needs.