Extending the Reach of Your Custom Award Design with Add-Ons
Designing a custom award for your next event is a great way to support your unique brand image and corporate positioning. Unlike pre-fabricated awards, a custom award design has a look and feel that is 100% unique to your brand and recipients. Custom awards are more like sculptures than anything else; the kind of thing that your recipients would be proud to display on their desks, mantels, or bookcases. However, like most things in life the more detailed and ornate something is the more it costs to create and produce. Your artistic design still has to fit inside the company budget, right?
Many of Bennett Awards’ clients produce a limited run of their custom awards (for the actual recipients) in order to keep in line with the budget. But the companies often want to extend their award designs to reach as broad an audience as possible for both further recognition and company branding efforts. The powerful branding that comes with these designs is unmistakable, and having something that beautiful attached to your name is too good to limit to a small audience.
One unique and creative way to extend the reach of your custom award design, beyond the actual recipients, would be to create add-on components that mimic your custom awards. These add-ons create an integrated recognition program you can extend to a broader base of recipients including attendees of the awards ceremony, as well as for use in future corporate events. There are many form-factor possibilities for these add-on elements, including medallions, key chains, pins, and plaques.
One example of how add-ons work can be seen in the medallions/key chains we created for Facebook’s company half marathon. The primary custom award we created for them is a perpetual trophy that sits in Facebook’s corporate headquarters in Palo Alto. Each year the name of the men’s and women’s half marathon winners will be added to the award. However, to extend the reach of this custom design, Bennett Awards also created custom medallions/key-chains in a very similar shape and design as the perpetual trophy. These medallion/key-chains are presented to the first through third place finishers in various event categories so that top finishers have something to take home with them.
Another example of turning your custom award design into an add-on is the lapel pins we created for the Wounded Warrior Project’s (WWP) Carry Forward Awards. The primary custom design is that of a pewter backpack sculptures mounted on an intricately engraved base, the design of which is inspired by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. However, the WWP also wanted to give attendees a memento that would serve as a lasting keepsake for the event so we created a lapel pin design that picked up on certain elements of the main award design.
If you really want to see how one custom design can transcend materials and shapes take a look at the “Get Your Pig On” barbeque competition awards. The Grand Champion and Reserve Grand Champion received custom trophies that featured pewter upright tongs holding the custom designed medals. The overall 3rd, 4th and 5th place winners received wood desk plaques mounted with both the custom medal and engraved plates with the award name. Winners of individual categories, such as Pork, Brisket, Ribs and Chicken, received the custom medals attached to a ribbon. Event sponsors were even included and they received engraved wall plaques that incorporated the custom medal design.
These are just a couple examples of integrated custom recognition programs we have created for our clients. Starting with a brilliant custom design for your event’s award ceremony is only the beginning. These add-ons represent an opportunity to make a strong branding statement and there really are no limits to what can be done with a healthy dose of creativity and know-how.
