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When you walk down the wines and spirits aisle in your local supermarket you will occasionally see a bottle with a promotional product hanging from the bottleneck or maybe the bottle has something wrapped around its neck like a collar. These bottle promotions are known as bottle tags, bottle collars and bottle hangers. You will have seen them countless times but how many times has a bottle promotion really stood out and caught your eye?

You might think that advertisers would believe that the attention-grabbing qualities of the bottle media would be paramount to the success of the bottle promotion and yet there doesn't seem to be anything on the wines and spirits bottle shelves that shouts out "look at me".

Also, the promotional products always seem so small. The "small print" on the back of a bottle collar really is printed very small. Bottle promotions need to be bigger not only from the point of view of visibility on the shelves but also to give the consumer some proper information regarding the promotion.

Bottle media is no different from any other form of supermarket advertising inasmuch as it has to be seen in order for it to work. In the case of on-bottle marketing there is another requisite step if the promotion is to be a success and that is for the consumer to actually participate. This could mean that the consumer has to complete and send off an entry form printed on the back of the bottle collar to enter a competition. It could be that a voucher is printed on the bottle tag for redemption by the consumer at the time of a later purchase. It could be that the bottle hanger has an offer that clicks in only when the consumer replies by email.

In each of these instances it strikes me that the promotion might be incidental to the bottle purchase if the consumer wasn't particularly drawn to the promotion in the first place. Surely, if the bottle promotion had a greater visual attraction then the casual consumer might be persuaded to choose that bottle of red wine over the other 50 varieties of red wines in the same section. Furthermore, if the bottle promotion was easier to read and contained lots of information then that might provide the consumer with a greater enticement to join in the promotion. This seems to me to be a big step forward for the advertiser.

The big question is this, with a bottleneck seemingly offering such a limited amount of space, how can the visual display and the print area be increased in order to achieve these desirable goals? One answer lies in a very popular form of marketing material that is known in marketing circles as "pocket media". Pocket media is the term used for printed items that utilise clever folding techniques to fold a large sheet down to the size of, say, a credit card so that it will fit neatly into a pocket, purse or handbag. An imaginative designer could combine pocket media with a standard bottle hanger to create a new form of bottle media which would instantly increase the print area.

Similarly, it would not tax the mind of a creative and inventive designer to come up with a slightly different design to increase the display area whilst maintaining the necessary ease of use that would be required at the packing plant in order to put the promotional products on to the bottle.

If these objectives could be achieved then I'm sure that advertisers would see a significant improvement in the success rate of bottle promotions.

Article by Paul Whitney.

Whitney Woods Ltd is a manufacturer of promotional marketing products designed using sophisticated cardboard engineering techniques. The company is a market leader in this field in the UK and publishes a range of new bottle media called The Bottle Boutique which can be seen by clicking http://www.popupmailers.co.uk/popup_bottlecollars.html .