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Though there are a lot of ways to waste money on custom promotional stickers let’s focus in on some quick and easy, down and dirty tips. With minimal effort companies can burn through money, get zero promotional value, and perhaps even damage their brand… immediately and over the long haul. Let’s get started…

Bad Promotional Sticker Design

These days it’s not hard to create a custom sticker that doesn’t resonate at all with your target market and can perhaps even annoy them and push them away from your company.

• Make the promotional stickers too big – thus it will cost more and assure that no one wants to apply the sticker anywhere.

• Stay away from die-cutting – Large white rectangles with lots of empty space are best. Die-cutting might risk looking cool and helping the stickers blend in with the object they are stuck to. For maximum waste we don’t want these promo stickers stuck anywhere.

• Use bad, low resolution art and make sure no proofing is involved. A crisp image with no typos would not help your wasteful promotional cause.

• Don’t add a URL or any means of contacting you. In fact, for maximum waste don’t tie in the promotional stickers at all with your identity so there is no way to have any idea what/who the sticker is promoting (if by chance these custom stickers get stuck somewhere).

• Consider using a clear material with no white ink on it so that the sticker is invisible once applied to a window.

The easiest way to achieve these goals is to design the sticker yourself, unless you have some design skills in which case ask a small child to draw the graphics for the promotional sticker. Definitely don’t ask customers or clients to suggest ideas or give input on best sticker designs – they are your target market and may know too much about what stickers your customers and prospects might like to receive and display.

Bad Promotional Sticker Distribution Options

• Don’t hand your promotional stickers out, try to sell them! If the bad design advice has been followed this should expedite the waste of your sticker investment.

• Leave them lying around on the ground or in public places – This is an extremely quick way to annoy people, destroy the sticker product ASAP and perhaps get a nice hefty fine for littering.

• Apply the sticker for people – Save your customers and fans the trouble of thinking or deciding for themselves. You can just stick a promotional sticker on their car, water bottle or laptop for them, without asking. This will certainly help destroy your brand/name faster while also inviting physical harm and police involvement.

• Pay customers to apply the promotional stickers. Just in case the sticker investment was not completely wasted, here’s a way to waste further money, fast, while damaging your brand.

Bonus Tips For Further Waste and Bad Promotional Stickers

• Though it may sound counter intuitive, use cheap materials and print methods. Though the stickers will fade and disintegrate faster the real benefit is the damage that can be done to your brand when the sticker fades and falls off leaving a nice sticky residue.

• Don’t Read the book, Stick This, or you may mistakenly create value in your sticker campaign and increase word of mouth, awareness, and sales.

• Order custom promotional stickers through a company that sells thousands of other promotional products, so they know as little as possible about sticker design and production. Don’t contact us at Websticker! Instead find a company online with no reviews (or bad reviews), no sticker guarantees, and no sticker design or sticker marketing help.

Good Luck!

Jeff Nicholson

Jeff Nicholson is the founder and Creative Director at Freely Creative, Inc. and Websticker, a sticker marketing company specializing in the design and production of custom stickers, decals, labels and magnets. He is the author of Stick This! Using Promotional Stickers To Build Identity, Create Word Of Mouth and Grow Sales.

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