Lanyards: The Forgotten Branding Tool. In amongst all the talk within marketing circles about the best promotional product for advertising your brand, the little old lanyard is often forgotten about. At one memorable event, a member of our team noticed a company had spent considerable money at a product launch on branded giveaways, silicone wristbands, custom bags etc, but that the staff demonstrating the new product (it happened to be a car launch) were wearing plain, unbranded lanyards.
Strange? We agree! Watching the crowd at this event, very little attention was given to the giveaways, but the salespeople demonstrating the features of the car had the unbridled attention of every person there. And they could have been wearing a branded product the whole time. Read on the better understand Lanyards the forgotten branding tool.
Lanyards make a strong promotional tool for all businesses. What other products can be worn by your staff for a functional purpose whilst simultaneously displaying your brand, a specific message, contact details or even a promotion. We have one retail customer who prints new lanyards for his service staff every 3 months to tie in with the latest promotion that the sales and marketing team have come up with i.e. “Ask us about free financing” or “10% off until July”. Because shoppers are generally overwhelmed with banners and signs in a shopping environment, messages on these signs are often missed. By placing promotions like this somewhere unique, like a lanyard, it garners more attention.
Free Lanyards for your Event
Often an event or venue knows that they desperately require lanyards but simply don’t have the budget for them. In this case, it’s time to start thinking about the promotional power of a lanyard. If you think about your customers, or attendees, do they represent a potential target market for a complimentary company who would love to get their brand in front of everyone at your event or venue? For instance, if you’re running a nightclub that attracts a crowd in their early 20’s, would an energy drink provider be interested in co branding your staff lanyards?
In our experience, the option of obtaining sponsors for lanyards, or even multiple co sponsors, can cover a significant portion of your lanyard expense. Due to the nature and size of a lanyard, it lends itself well to having multiple logo’s and brands printing along it, as well as website URL’s or event Facebook links.
Lanyards and RFID – sexy technology!
In conjunction with RFID cards, lanyards enter a whole new world in terms of their branding potential and capabilities. More and more events, exhibitions, conferences and music festival VIP areas are turning to RFID cards attached to lanyards as a means to not only identify people and display their credentials, but to have them engage in certain activities at an event or venue.
What are we talking about? Good question! RFID cards contain a radio-frequency identification chip that can work with certain systems to achieve fantastic benefits. At a recent University Open Day, lanyards and RFID cards were issued to every attendee. The system at the event allowed for users to scan their RFID card at a certain faculty and then be automatically emailed with the details regarding a specific course. At the same time, a competition was run by the university challenging attendees to scan in at 5 designated points (in this case they were the university dorms, the cafeteria, the sporting facilities, the library and finally the central quad). Anyone who successfully scanned in at all 5 checkpoints were then automatically SMS’d with a voucher that provided them with 50% off at the university merchandise store.
The above demonstrates a clever way to achieve several goals:
- Encourage attendees to undertake a desirable activity (in this case, get the full University experience by viewing as many of the core facilities as possible
- Encourage attendees to then spend money on branding themselves in the University merchandise (hats, shirts etc)
- It was all done in such a way that attendees raved about the “engagement” they felt with the University and the fun they had.
By using RFID, and lanyards, the University effectively engaged with potential students (customers).
Lanyards And Their Role in Safety
Lanyards play a surprising role in safety at offices, worksites and events worldwide. Whilst they are often viewed as a simple means of displaying identification (because that is indeed what they do), there are elements of lanyards that play a genuine role in keeping people safe.
Preventing unauthorised access
The most common safety related benefit of a lanyard is preventing access to certain areas. This is very common is office towers in major cities, with a lanyard (and accompanying ID card0 being provided at check-in on the ground floor, presenting you as an authorised visitor to the building. Often, this is provided in exchange for your driving license, a great deterrent for anyone trying to enter the building for illegal purposes.
Secondly the card at the end of the lanyard may even be equipped with RFID or NFC technology, with means you will need to scan the card at the elevator to gain access to it, and that it will only go to the floor (and therefore the office) that you have claimed to be visiting.
Lanyards are very common at music festivals, events and conferences. More and more events are taking steps to increase the security of their lanyard by incorporating reflective materials and by ordering heat sublimated lanyards – these are very hard to replicate or copy because they allow a full colour artwork to be presenting with digital quality colours and imagery on display. Be being tough to replicate, they become very secure as a means of identification.
Lanyards with safety measures
As has been highlighted by several instances recently, lanyards should always be purchased with a safety breakaway. Consider the case of this young student who was strangled by his lanyard when it got caught on a cubicle door; thankfully he survived, but not before spending 4 months in hospital and suffering severe injuries. Read More.
A safety breakaway can be manufactured in to the lanyard at either the back of the neck or the side. If the lanyard gets caught on anything, it will snap off when a certain amount of pressure is applied, preventing injury like the tragic case above. When you consider the environments that lanyards are often used; offices, factories, busy events, festivals, schools, the risk of such an accident is such that surely it’s an easy decision to incorporate a safety breakaway on all lanyards, especially when they cost as little as 10c extra per lanyard.
For more information on lanyards, touch base with AAC. For a sample, come visit – here at AAC we even leave a bowl of AAC-branded lanyards at our reception counter, and it is almost guaranteed that we will need to refill this every Monday morning. Lanyards… the forgotten branding tool!
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