Say I want to make inflatable beach balls with the logo of my company. I want to give them for free to stores for them to sell at a low price (price marked on the packaging and lower than competing items). The idea being that I will get publicity at the cost of making and distributing these balls. And that by these not being freebies, the stores won’t just thrown them away when I am gone.
Is this an established practice? (I know I didn’t invent it since I am copying it from a friend who does it with a magazine). Is there a name for it?
I’m curious too, because I’m not sure how this is any different than Nike putting a big corporate logo on everything they sell. I can’t think of really anything at the moment that I buy that doesn’t have a logo on it.
You may or may not run foul of something like this. Wisconsin - The Unfair Sales Act. I think you’re safe with that statute. I don’t know what the laws are where you are and you don’t mention your location for others to answer the question.
Well, no. This is different from Nike branding their products. They do earn from the sale of their product and branding it serves to further brand awareness, feeding more sales.
My question is about distributing for free a product to businesses which would later sell such product for their own gain while I don’t get any share of that gain, only whatever intangible gain I can get from people having/using that product.
Say, for example, that I make a magazine. I distribute it to newsstands for free, but the magazine is not intended for free distribution to the public, but for sale. This ensures, first that the magazine only falls in the hands of people who care about it, and secondly that the newsstand will take care of it and bother to distribute it. The newsstand keeps all the money from the sale, I don’t get any of it. My gain is that I sell ad space in that magazine.
I don’t see how you can insure the shop owners don’t give them away for free.
Once you give it to them, they can do as they wish. They may follow your wishes and offer them for cheap. But if they don’t move, I can’t see that you have any recourse if they end up giving them away as freebies.
I certainly have no way of making them sell them, but there is no reason for them to give away what they can sell. Putting a price tag on it only works as an incentive for them to accept it from me in the first place. Otherwise they are just better off not taking them and not cluttering their store.
What you are not considering is that retailers do not give out shelf space for free. Manufacturers fight hard for their share of the retail shelf space and store presence. Just because you are not charging the retailer for selling your product, they may very well charge you for being in the store since they can very well use the space for more profitable products.