Give Your Employees the Shirt on Your Back

One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to promote your brand or business is to have your employees don a shirt with your logo.

While business owners and managers constantly strive for the latest trendy, sophisticated, (and usually expensive), advertising platform, they often overlook the numerous walking, talking billboards that surround themselves every day! In fact, according to a 2008 study by the Advertising Specialty Institute, the return on investment from marketing tools like logos on shirts is greater than almost any other advertising platform.

This simple, but effective act of attiring a company’s employees with the firm’s logo helps to build brand awareness while reinforcing the company’s professionalism.

Employees outfitted with the company’s logo can provide numerous advertising impressions at little cost. As is typical, employees will spend their lunch break running errands, or at a restaurant. After work, they will immediately go pick up a child at school, or perhaps go shopping. Either way, shirts with the company’s logo turn your employees into walking, talking billboards.

These brand ambassadors will work to market your company both inside the business and out. Think about it. After work, employees will spread out across your marketing area, sending vital advertising impressions of your company’s logo out to places unreachable by other advertising methods. An employee wearing a company shirt to his or her dental appointment, or to a parent/teacher conference, puts your company’s logo in front of numerous new potential customers each and every day. Whether it is at the post office, grocery store, or the little league field, your employees will be advertising your business throughout the community. Best of all, they will be doing it off the clock!

To be sure, there is the slight chance one of your “ambassadors” will behave inappropriately while wearing a shirt with your company logo. We have all seen such behavior by an off-hours uniformed employee. However, an employee in company attire acting rude at say, a grocery store, will not likely have a negative impact on the reputation of the company as a whole. While the obnoxious behavior will make that specific person look bad, it will not translate into a negative image of the company itself. Reasonable people will chalk that up to one “bad apple.” Meanwhile, the countless number of positive impressions your employees send out to the company while wearing the logo will only increase brand awareness.

For simple, affordable, and effective advertising, outfitting the company’s employees with a shirt with the company’s logo is a marketing medium that cannot be unmatched.