Personalised Pens – Route To Market Strategies For Trade Suppliers

I think it is fairly obvious to most keen observers of the changes in the promotional pen industry that the lines between being a trade supplier of personalised pens and an end-user supplier are becoming blurred. As discussed in an earlier news item more and more distributors are becoming trade suppliers whilst at the same time demanding that their own suppliers remain trade-exclusive. An onerous aspiration if ever I heard one as it is fundamentally unfair. I believe a number of seemingly trade exclusive suppliers of personalised pens are not standing idly by and are finding their own route to market through the following mechanisms

• Overtly opening or buying a distributor business and using that to secure route to market. This is seemingly like shooting yourself in the foot but in reality there is little downside to running with the hare and hunting with the hound. This will be the topic of a future article related to the trade sales of personalised pens.
• Working hand-in-glove with existing distributors on an exclusive or semi-exclusive basis. This is like a half way house and of course there is nothing wrong with the practice but it is a policy that is designed to curry favour with a particular distributor (usually influential) on the basis of excluding other distributors. It is a matter of opinion whether this is an acceptable practice for selling personalised pens and the two opinions on the matter are probably governed by whichever side of the fence you are sitting on.
• Cloaking: The practice of overtly selling personalised pens to the end-user through a distributor business that is covertly owned or sponsored by the seemingly trade-exclusive supplier. There is no hard evidence this is happening but there are plenty of indicators to suggest it is being used as a strategy, particularly where online business is concerned. Opinion on this will be divided on the lines of whether it is right or wrong. Distributors will clearly feel betrayed and many trade exclusive suppliers will quietly be thinking ‘not for me at the moment, but I will keep my options open’.

Does this mean that I believe we will have umpteen trade-exclusive businesses going direct in a covert fashion somewhere down the line? I don’t know is the answer but  I do know that The Pen Warehouse has a strategy in place that will secure our position as trade-exclusive supplier forever.

However, in an industry such as ours, where there are no trade associations with regulatory teeth it was always going to be an inevitability that trade-exclusive suppliers would be forced to resort to desperate measures. If it is happening we should blame nobody but ourselves for sitting on our hands and allowing our industry to be largely unregulated. That will also be the basis of a future news item on personalised pens.

Stay tuned in to our daily news desk here at The Pen Warehouse – The Home Of Personalised Pens.