PFI Aims to Make it Easy for Distributors to Tap the Power of Brands
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One of the first incentive companies to start selling to promotional distributors over 40 years ago, this Ohio-based incentive company has added new technology and support services to make it even easier for distributors to expand their businesses.Why the Increasing Focus on Brands, Incentive, and Recognition Programs
How Partners for Incentives Supports Distributors
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As owner of one of the few US incentive companies that sells exclusively through promotional distributors and related types of agencies and service providers, Mary Anne Comotto, CEO, says she understands why only a small percentage of distributors focus on brands, incentive, and recognition programs and why more of them now are coming around.
Capitalizing on her company’s role as one of the first in the IRR (incentive, rewards, an recognition) industry not only to create online incentive, reward, and gifting technology, but to sell only through distributors, her team has created a series of demos for every major type of incentive and recognition program, including gifting and redemption platforms; promotional sheets distributors customize to promote their incentive and reward services and, most importantly, a highly experienced team of five program support professionals with over 50 years of experience helping distributors succeed in the business.
Why the Increasing Focus on Brands, Incentive, and Recognition Programs
Comotto believes the long-delayed disruption feared of the internet is finally coming to the promotional products business mainly because the emergence of companies like 4Imprint.com and Customink.com. Not only are industry sales essentially flat, she says, noting Promotional Products Association International estimates, “but more distributors are being asked by their clients to use brands, redemption sites and other strategies to make sure people use and retain the gifts they receive. For sustainability reasons, more companies are giving people a nice thank you note with a code that the recipient can use to redeem the items that they really want on a web site. This both reduces waste and enhances program impact,” she says. “Distributors can end up making even more, because companies are offering higher priced brands.”
The redemption sites can be customized to reinforce the sponsoring organization’s message or even to engage people in other services or messages.
The impact of the entry of national marketers into the market and the increased use of brands or web-based redemption sites, she believes, points to a profound opportunity to diversify how the promotional industry creates value for clients. “Between the national marketers of promotional products, these companies are selling over $2 billion a year, not far from 10% of the marketplace, much of it driven not only by the Internet or promotional distributors but by television advertising most distributors can’t afford. Of course, these companies are tapping into consumer-driven business that distributors might never have bothered with, but their advertising is aimed directly at businesses and organizations. With both of these major players now featuring brand-name products on their home pages, distributors simply can’t ignore it.”
The answer, she says, is already happening. “More distributors are coming to us these days to learn how they can take advantage of the IRR marketplace, as well as looking for other services to help their clients.”
She notes that “when we first started selling our incentive technology through distributors in the late 1990s, we knew we were ahead of our time. Despite concerns that the Internet would dis-intermediate distributors by making it so easy to customize and purchase promotional products online, it really didn’t happen to the extent people were concerned for many, many years. If fact, the technology made it possible for distributors to better compete in the promotional products world by giving them tools to automate their businesses and develop their own offshore sources for product. Today, it’s not the Internet alone that’s cutting into their business, it the role of national marketers and desirability of brands.”
How Partners for Incentives Supports Distributors
Opportunities are wide-open for distributors, she believes, “because there are probably no more than about 100 incentive and recognition companies, and most are calling on the nation’s largest 1,000 to 2,000 companies. That leaves over 200,000 for-profit organizations, not to mention more not-for-profit organizations with annual turnover of $10 million or more who few are calling upon to help engage sales and non-sales employees, channel partners, and customers.”
Given the business model of the national promotional distributors selling through advertising, she believes it’s highly unlikely they are going to focus on incentive, reward, and recognition program design, implementation, and measurement when their models are clearly based on scale.
PFI starts, she says, by providing distributors and related reseller partners with customizable promotional materials, and easily deployable technology platforms with demos for years of service, sales, employee, safety programs, as well generic points redemptions platforms for event and occasion gifting. “Even more importantly, we support our distributors from start to finish with five full-time program design specialists who can help all the way from the sales discovery process, program design and implementation, and results measurement.” See RRN: PFI--Striving to Help Distributors Thrive in the IRR Market.
“Our goal is to make it simple, easy and low cost for distributors’ clients to start testing an engagement program that addresses the key levers of engagement on a single platform based on what they are trying to accomplish. Once they see results in one area, it’s easier to expand the programs across the enterprise.”
She believes it’s perfectly understandable why many distributors have shied away from incentive, rewards, and recognition market and brands. “This is beyond selling a product; it’s selling a service that does require some level of fact-finding to identify and initiate a sales opportunity. But once a client is engaged, it potentially results in years of highly automated repeat business as well as relationships that create other opportunities, such as event gifting and other marketing services.”
How RRN and Brand Media Coalition: Your Partner in Success in Incentives, Rewards, and Recognition
Published by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance at TheEEA.org
- The only weekly news, how-to and resource publication of record for the Incentive, Rewards, and Recognition field.
- The only marketing agency focusing specifically on the IRR and broader engagement marketplace.
The Industry’s Only Combined Media Platform and Marketing Agency to Help You Expand Your Business 
- All the industry news, research, announcements, and how-to articles read by over 20,000 end-users in sales, marketing, and human resources; incentive, recognition, loyalty and promotional companies, as well as marketing and human resources agencies, seeking to enhance performance through effectively designed incentive programs.
- Unparalleled business development services for engagement, incentive and incentive travel, recognition firms; brands, gift cards and master fulfillment companies, and technology firms, featuring ROI-based business development strategy design and ongoing digital and social media and e-newsletter communications to help marketers profit in the coming era of cookie-less marketing.
- Unique abilities for solution providers to sponsor authoritative, evergreen content directly related to what they sell through the EEA’s Effective Practices series on articles in our media platforms.
- EEA YouTube Channel with over three dozen how-to and insight videos and growing with nearly 100 expert guests.
- Access to new technologies from EEA preferred solution providers enabling brands to create their own points-based or transactional redemption site.
- Unparalleled expertise in program design, return on investment measurement, reporting, and prescriptive analytics.
