'Tis Better to Give

Special section devoted to building customer and employee relations through holiday gifts and parties.

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Take advantage of the holiday season to spread goodwill and your good name

For many small companies, it's all too tempting to take the whole idea of business-to-business gift giving and procrastinate it to death. After all, the world can get by without another coffee mug with your logo on it. Still, you don't want your company to be conspicuously absent when packages start to arrive. So you puzzle over what to send.

Indecision is just one of the dead-end afflictions of company gift giving. Time and money are inhibiting factors, too. After all, the customers of a backlogged manufacturer don't want tokens of esteem; they want their order -- in hand, yesterday. And you certainly shouldn't buy gifts with cash you don't have. "For years we've been waiting to do something charitable," sighs Bob Block, president of Sage Advance Corp., a manufacturer of solar-energy equipment in Eugene, Ore. "But not till next year, not till we're profitable." Your investors thank you, Bob.

Then there's the fear of sending the wrong message. You wouldn't want to send something too Saint Nick to a client who doesn't celebrate Christmas or offer a package of sausage and cheese to somebody recovering from triple-bypass surgery. You don't want to come off cheap. At the same time, you don't want to be so lavish that you've got to fill out 1099s on all your recipients. And if you're thinking about copping out and sending a selection of your own products, think again.

"Even if there weren't state regulations preventing us from doing it, we wouldn't dream of sending out our beer as gifts," says David Mickelson, chief financial officer at Redhook Ale Brewery Inc., in Seattle. It would look too self-serving, he says. Mickelson's idea of a just-right corporate gift? The box of apples his office receives each year from its accountants. "Their purchase benefits a local children's society, and at the same time it gives us something we can eat without feeling rotten."

If there's anybody who can afford to be smug on the issue of gift giving, it's those companies whose clients have let them off the hook. "Our corporate customers won't even let their people accept a birthday cake from us," says JosÉ Lacal, president of BakeryCorp, a wholesaler in North Miami, Fla. No-gift policies are proliferating, and Lacal thinks that's good. "It keeps the playing field level," he says. "That way we know we compete only on our quality and on our service."

Yet a sensitive, creative gift remains both relevant and effective in many business relationships. A company can say, "Thanks" or "We'd love to have your business." But there can be more to it than that. Gift giving offers a rare nonsales opportunity to step forward and say, "This is what we do." Even better, it offers the rarer opportunity to say, "This is who we are."

Shock of Recognition
Darby O'Brien Advertising Inc.

South Hadley, Mass.

The wooden crate caused quite a stir on arrival at the Wall Street Journal's offices in Manhattan. "The mail room took one look at it and called N.Y.P.D.," recalls Darby O'Brien, founder and president of a South Hadley, Mass., ad agency of the same name.

And who wouldn't? The crate was emblazoned with these heart-stopping words: "No matter how careful you are when you pick out Christmas presents, there's always a chance that one of them's going to turn out to be a real bomb." Inside lay an old navy practice bomb. It was very big (almost four feet long), very government issue (O'Brien had secured 150 of them from a surplus catalog), and very much a dud (whew). "Everybody enjoyed the joke," O'Brien alleges, "but the N.Y.P.D. still called us and gave us kind of a lecture."

In choosing his bombastic Christmas greeting, O'Brien didn't waste time wondering what the recipients would do with such gifts. How could he have guessed, for example, that a toy-industry executive would use his bomb as a planter or that Bobby Kennedy's son, Michael, who presides over Citizens Energy Corp., in Boston, would forward it to his unsuspecting father-in-law, Frank Gifford?

But adman O'Brien was absolutely clear about the point he was trying to make. The same one he tried to make once on St. Patrick's Day, when he sent his list of clients and prospects an "authentic Irish bowling ball" -- a cabbage, with three holes drilled in it. "We like to show a little personality," he says. "We like to convey that this is one ad agency that isn't afraid to take a bold approach with its message."

O'Brien is also smart enough, however, to know when enough's enough. The year after the bomb, he sent a small, elegantly wrapped package with a note that read, "Wrapping presents goes faster with the right kind of tape." Inside was an early-release copy of country singer Randy Travis's Old Time Christmas. "That was before the country-music trend really caught on," O'Brien says, "and I think it made a lot of converts."

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