The eco-conscious movement is here and does not budge. Moreover, it gains more power and more awareness every single day. As a business owner, you have to understand that consumers and shareholders demand that companies employ sustainable practices in all their strategies and everyday practices, including marketing.
Among such policies, eco friendly promotional products make an important part in your approach towards sustainability. This is why we will look at 12 eco friendly promotional products and their importance to your company’s mission and values.
What is Sustainability and How Does it Match Marketing?
According to sustainability specialists, sustainable items “provide environmental, social, and economic benefits”. They also should protect the public health, welfare, and the environment in all their stages, from the choice of materials to the products’ disposal. Following this definition, your eco friendly promotional products should comply with the following rules:
- They come in natural materials;
- They are biodegradable;
- They do not harm either people or nature during their production cycle as well as after their disposal.
As marketing is concerned, eco friendly promotional products make a strong statement from the point of view of your customers, partners, and shareholders. According to recent statistics, more and more consumers try to change their lifestyles towards more environmentally mindful ones. This shift in perspective and choices also includes the use of green products.
When you implement environmental friendly promotional products in your brand’s overall marketing strategy, you start appealing to the majority of your consumers and potential clients. Moreover, your consumers and shareholders who champion green living will further reinforce and promote your brand’s story and efforts.
In addition, if you consider that most, if not all, eco-friendly promotional products allow you to display your logo and motto on them, you have no reason not to engage in sustainability company practices (which also include marketing).
12 Eco Friendly Promotional Products for Your Green Marketing Plan
If you think that such products limit your marketing plan involving gift bags, giveaways, or promotional items, you will be surprised by their variety and range of uses. If you want your voice to be heard and your brand to be seen, you can also pick other collaborators who also manufacture sustainable products. Here are our top choices!
1. Organic Cotton Canvas Tote Bags
Tote bags in general have become the go-to promotional item or giveaway for brands and corporate events. They offer enough space for you to personalize them with your logo, message, statement, and so on. Moreover, they come in sensible sizes to host a myriad of goodies you want to fill them up with.
If you want to take things up a notch, pick organic cotton canvas tote bags. The 100% certified organic cotton is extremely popular these days, as it guarantees not only the sustainability of the product, but its intrinsic value and high quality. Strong, durable, versatile, and extremely useful, such tote bags will place you among the brands that are truly concerned with the environment and their shareholders’ life choices.
2. Ceramic / Terracotta Flower Planter
What better way to green up a person’s office or home than a small succulent plant or cactus coming in a ceramic cute planter and a heart-melting design? When it comes to offering potted flowers or plants in large numbers, logistics can become difficult, but you should try. Nothing speaks better about your brand’s environmental concerns, sense of humor, lightheartedness, care for the beauty and health of the receivers’ spaces like plants and pots do.
The beauty of such promotional item is that it can be as small as you want. It will also appeal to everybody, no matter his or her age or gender. You can also up your ante and buy the ceramic pots from a local manufacturer, who promotes eco-friendliness and manual crafts as well and you have something truly amazing to make a memorable impression. You can paint your logo or slogan on the planter and have the most elegant and stylish marketing strategy of the year.
3. Bamboo Pen Holder
Together with cotton and jute, bamboo is a praised sustainable natural material that works great with all champions of green living. Since everybody has a desk at their workplace or at home, the bamboo pen stander is a mindful, useful promotional item you can personalize any way you want.
Print your logo or use a cute sticker with a message and you will turn your marketing strategy into a success story. Make sure the bamboo comes from controlled and eco-conscious plantations and processing facilities and you will have the next favorite giveaway of your consumers or business partners.
4. Jute Tote Bags
The durable 100% natural jute fiber is another great option on your eco friendly promotional products list. If you pick some jute tote bags with deep full gusset, the world is your oyster. Besides coming in a strong and sustainable fabric, such bags are spacious, practical, and can match all your promotional needs.
The natural nuance of jute bags plays on the rustic flair people associate with green living. They offer a wide area for you to silkscreen print or embroider your logo, the date of an event, a hashtag, a motto, or anything you want. Besides being perfect for promotional uses, trade shows, and corporate giveaways, these burlap tote bags speak of your deep understanding of what sustainability really is.
5. Eco-Friendly Drawstrings Single Bottle Jute Wine Bags
If you want to make a memorable impression on your shareholders or partners, offer them some bottles of wine as a gift. Make sure you pick a local wine producer with a strong reputation in the sustainable winemaking business and an exclusive / boutique range of products. Such gifts are incredibly valuable as they send a very powerful message: you support local entrepreneurs and endorse high-end products that come from personal passion and mind the environment.
Now that you picked the wine, go further and gift the wine in eco-friendly drawstrings single bottle jute wine bags with your logo on them. The present will be unforgettable and your brand’s vision taken to heart.
6. Cork Coasters
Cork is one of the three most appraised sustainable materials, together with bamboo and cotton. Cork is also incredibly versatile and fun to work with. Besides the fact that you can send a set of cork coasters to everybody you know, you can send them together with your logo, fun messages and slogans, drawings, designs, monograms, and everything you can think of.
Do not think that you can base your marketing strategy only if you are active in the restaurant industry. As long as you tweak your message to match the industry or the receivers’ occupations, tastes, or hobbies, only the sky is your limit. After all, we all have a favorite mug on our desks we need a fun coaster for.
7. Eco Friendly Recycled Travel Kit
When you prepare a marketing activity based on promotional products, you have to think in big numbers. Forget about the ubiquitous plastic pen bearing a boring logo and take things up a notch. You need a large batch of useful promotional products that are unisex, age independent, useful to the receiver, customizable with your brand’s emblem/message and out of the box enough to keep people talking about your brand.
The eco-friendly recycled travel kits match all the criteria above and are also… well, eco-friendly. Both men and women of any age will simply adore them, as they can host cosmetic and grooming products, gadgets, headphones, personal items, and more. And who doesn’t appreciate a 100% post-consumer recycled PET fabric that will last for years? Add your logo and champion sustainability in a fun, mindful, and innovative manner.
8. Cork USB Drive
We admit we do love cotton and cork dearly, just as much as we love a competent USB drive. If your customers or stakeholders are like us, they will never say no to yet another USB drive. Who does say no to such a wonder we cannot live without? Bringing the best of both worlds means preparing cork USBs as eco-friendly promotional products. Your tech savvy and eco-aware clientele will simply love them.
The symbolism of such item is also important. The cork USB is the definitive proof that nature and technology not only can co-exist, but they can complement each other beautifully. The cork layer of the USB can hold a stylish discrete logo or slogan to make the right kind of noise among your customers.
9. Premium Cotton Towels
If your brand is active in the hospitality industry, in sports and fitness, textile manufacturing, events organization and promotion, offering towels as giveaways or end-of-year gifts to your customers and shareholders may become an amazing idea. Why should you not choose premium quality 100% cotton towels that you can further personalize with your monogram or logo?
If you want to promote your new bookstore, maybe towels will not quite match your business field, but if you want to thank all your clients for subscribing to your gym classes, then towels are perfect eco friendly reminders that you are grateful for their dedication and hopeful you will work together again in the future.
10. Cotton Lanyard
Lanyards are other corporate darling promotional gifts because they are very useful and visible. People use them as key holders, ID or badge holders, and so on. Branded lanyards are the go-to items for large-scale promotions and giveaways. While we are used to receive such items as badge holders at festivals, concerts, or conventions, receiving a cute, whimsical one with a monogram, emblem, slogan, or nice imprint will take your brand to new places.
Keep in mind that even in our hi-tech, social-media powered world, the word of mouth is still your most powerful marketing weapon. In other words, make people talk about you fondly and allow them to proudly recommend you to their friends and peers.
11. Eco Friendly Recycled Briefcase
Do you know how many people actually want a corporate style briefcase that has the environment in mind? If your customers or shareholders’ pool consists of young urban professionals, college students, freelancers, and mobile creatives, these eco-friendly recycled briefcases may be exactly what you need to make a favorable and long-term impact on them.
Such promotional venue shows that your brand knows who they are and what they need. Moreover, it shows you care about them as people and the environment as our cradle of life. Look for such briefcases coming in 100% post-consumer recycled PET fabric that lasts for years. These items offer you quite the space to adorn them with your logo and brand’s headline.
12. Eco Friendly Recycled Duffel Bag
Another universally lovable gift, an eco-friendly duffel bag in a 100% post-consumer recycled PET fabric will satisfy the expectations of all your customers and collaborators. Practical, valuable, usable in all contexts of life, and matching almost all types of businesses (yes, the bookstore included), eco-friendly recycled duffel bags are the go-to choices for many brands and corporate marketing strategies.
Get your slogan visibly printed on the bags and you will have a promoter and a PR in each person traveling with the bag in all the cities in the entire world.
Eco Friendly Promotional Products: Be the Voice of the Revolution
If you are serious about environmental protection and making sustained efforts to align yourself to the eco movement, you have everything to gain. Beyond impressing your clients, your advocacy towards sustainability becomes a part of your brand’s story, mission, vision, and values. This generation supports the environmental revolution and young people are the champions of change.
Therefore, a coherent and honest marketing strategy should go beyond eco friendly promotional products, because your work is just beginning. Start using sustainable materials as a company (recycled paper, bamboo office supplies, corkboards, etc.), reduce paper waste, focus on everyday products with less impact on the environment, and so on.
If you want your eco marketing strategies to come to fruition, your business storytelling should also come from a genuine concern for the environment.