2. Improve your mental outlook about you, your products and services. "You Are The Message." Eliminate negative clues by preparing yourself with confidence of a winner. Use friendly language and genuine enthusiasm; reflecting energy, trust and openness will open up consumer when probing for their thinking and core metaphors. Assertive and outgoing personalities, regardless of ethnic background, will outpace those people whose characteristics display shy and timid behaviors.

3. Design your office, retail store layout, waiting rooms, ads and brochures that reflect Metaphors of your market. Example of how one Doctors office focused on outpatients care as being more nurturing and responsive. Patients view rooms with chairs lined up in rows as boring, frustrating and long waits. The office was rearranged to promote friendliness and privacy and was supplied with several TV’s and a computer. The results were a decline in waiting time complaints and patients felt they were receiving a better quality of care, referral rates increased more that 18 percent and patient cancellations decreased by 23 percent.

4. Build into your oral and written marketing/sales communications stories using metaphors gathered from your market.

5. Probing mind of your customer/client requires you uncovering metaphors they use when thinking about purchasing your products and services. Once you have uncovered their metaphors you can identify some or most of important and hidden drivers of your customer/client buying behaviors.

6. Develop an organizational climate and a workplace attitude that strengthens sales and marketing creativity. This requires breaking into more boxes and not applying metaphor that suggests you step out of box. Breaking into more boxes enables you to gather gleaning new knowledge and will help pry you loose of conventional thinking. How you think is more important and will produce more productive and innovational ideas than what you think.

On flipside, if you are looking at motivating employees, thanking customers, buying gifts or building premiums chances are you will want to budget more money per item. However, there is likely to be fewer items ordered. I don't think a pen would be ample to thank someone for years of service! Items for these categories would fall under desk supplies, plaques, acrylic awards, clocks, engraved items and more.

If you are using these items or sales purposes, perhaps if you have traveling sales people, you will want something that will be left behind to keep your name top of mind. Things like a note cube or coffee mug are things that can sit on a decision-makers desk for a long time.

If you are looking to promote your business at an event, such as a concert or festival, passing out t-shirts could be a great idea. You can easily tie t-shirts up in knots and throw them to crowds. Lower ticket items for events could be things like pens, pencils, keychains, magnets, calendars, tape measures and more.

Finally, cost is something to keep in mind too. You don't want to spend same amount on a prospect as you would on a loyal customer. Use this as a suggestion: Under $5- Prospect $5-$25- Reward Over $25- Loyalty

The important thing here is that promotional items should not be ordered just because you like it. The item should clearly be in plan to help meet your business objectives.