Adventures in Stationery by Ward James;

Author:Ward, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

A survey for one travel web site found that 6 per cent of the 928 customers they polled admitted to taking stationery from hotels (compared with just 2 per cent who admitted to pocketing miniature jars of jam from the breakfast bar). Is this stealing? Matthew Pack, the CEO of HolidayExtras.com who carried out the survey doesn’t think so, saying ‘Hotels do factor in the cost of most of these items, and we are actually doing them a favour when we take branded goodies home with us.’ The opportunity to spread the branding message on a piece of hotel stationery is often limited – if the hotel is lucky, it will be picked up by someone like ‘Mrs Q’ who will use it to write a letter to a friend, but much of it must end up tucked away in a drawer somewhere, never to be seen again or just used to scribble down a shopping list or a message while on the phone.

Sometimes though, hotel stationery will reach a much wider audience. Beginning in 1987, and continuing until his death a decade later, the German artist Martin Kippenberger produced a series of drawings made on hotel stationery which he had collected as he travelled around the world. Known as the ‘hotel drawings’, the works have no real defining theme or style other than the origin of the raw materials. ‘Kippenberger grounded his volatile oeuvre paradoxically in a concept of fleeting provenance,’ wrote Rod Mengham in an article for the Saatchi Gallery’s online magazine. ‘His suitcase aesthetic derived clearly from a kind of magnetic aversion to the common understanding of “home”; he reversed the usual polarity and consequently never looked like he was doing anything more than just passing through.’ At a recent auction, one hotel drawing (‘a self-portrait of the artist, seen with hands clasped behind his back, standing in the corner like a scolded schoolboy’) drawn in coloured pencil on a sheet of paper headed with the Hotel Washington logo sold for £217,250.

But if it is true that hotels are happy for us to take their pens as it promotes their brand, how effective is stationery as an advertising or promotional tool? Well, it seems that it is indeed actually pretty effective. Research by the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) suggests that promotional products perform better than other marketing tools in a number of ways, including ‘high recall where the name of the advertiser is remembered’, ‘repeated exposure to the advertising message because of the length of time the item is kept’ and ‘a more favourable impression of the advertiser, resulting in a propensity to do business with the organisation giving the item’. The British Promotional Merchandise Association (BPMA) also published similar findings, with 56 per cent of people in one survey saying they felt more favourable towards a brand or company when they received a promotional item. BPMA board director Stephen Barker said that the research showed that ‘promotional merchandise is a highly cost-effective form of promotion which gives a ROI [return on investment] that is higher or equal to all other forms of media’.

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