My house is a magnet for personalized pens from all over the place! I like to read where they are from and sometimes I am surprised that they give me useful information. If you have the same experience, then you can also deduce that personalized pens can be valuable marketing tools. My husband and I were having lunch one day in a large city. One of his business contacts came over to say hello. I was surprised to hear him mention one of the personalized pens that he had gotten from my husband’s business a couple of years ago. He said, “I like to use the pen you gave me. It is running out of ink. Do you have any more?” So, from that I learned that if you are going to get pens personalized it is nice to choose the ones people will like to use. That way, your name stays in front of them for a long time.

Another thing about personalized pens is that the cost is so low to get your name out so far. Like I said initially, we have pens at our house that I have no idea where they came from. I have pens from faraway places that must have traveled home in my husband’s pocket after he attended business meetings. Who knows? Judging from the fact that I have pens from random businesses, I would guess that many people end up with pens that mysteriously show up, too. In fact, I always thought it would be interesting to see a documentary of a promotional pen being followed from its origin to where it finally landed. As an experiment in this type of marketing, someone should send a box of promo pens to a store someplace far away. The pen should contain contact information or a website, so that any interest shown could be tracked. It would be interesting to see just how widespread the pens get.

Knowing that people like geo-caching and letters they find in a bottle floating in the ocean, my best guess says that people will participate if the pen says something like “Comment on our page so we can see where this pen landed.” I just might try that myself! If you think about it, pens are one of the few things that everyone uses every single day. It is true that a lot of our communications are now done online. However, when you take a lunch break and go to the restaurant, you use a pen to sign the receipt while paying for lunch. You also use a pen when you sign in at the doctor’s office. Another time you use a pen is to write out a check. Perhaps you need to write a note for your child’s absence at school.

We still use pens a lot more than we think we do! Therefore, we still see a lot of traveling pens. Having said all this, I still have not seen a pen show up from India or China at my house. So, maybe they do not use promotional pens as much over there. It would be fun to see random pens from all over the world at my house. Of course, if they showed up written in Hindu or Mandarin Chinese, I wouldn’t be able to read them anyway! It is great when companies in foreign countries add a couple of words of English to their advertisements, so we can at least figure out what it is about. Some websites have absolutely no English. If they want us to read their website, they should add English. Maybe we need to add Chinese to our websites and pens, too!