If someone rented billboard space for a month and only displayed a logo, we would call it madness.
Yet that is exactly what most organizations do every time they order a bag, a bottle, or a shirt with only their logo on it. The object travels through the world. It has the attention of everyone who sees it. And it says nothing worth stopping for.
Adding copy to the bag is a step forward. It is not the answer. It is one piece of a puzzle that most organizations have never assembled, which is precisely why the complete picture has always been just out of reach. The bag with a message is better than the bag with only a logo.
But a message without a system to receive it, without a clear path to the next step, without a reason for the right person to care, is just a more articulate version of the same silence. The puzzle needs all its pieces. This page is about finding them.
You came looking for T-shirts, conference bags, water bottles, or swag. Maybe you have a conference coming up. Maybe it is an association event, a community gathering, a recruitment drive, or a fundraiser. Maybe you have a deadline, a budget, and a team expecting you to come back with something that looks good and arrives on time.
That is exactly where this story begins.
You are also, if you are honest with yourself, a little tired of spending money on things that end up in drawers, donation bins, and landfills. Things your organization approved because everyone else orders them and nobody has ever offered a better answer. Things that felt like a good idea at the time and produced nothing you could point to when the invoice arrived.
Maybe you are even searching for greener or more local ideas, but in your gut you know that you are just substituting greener landfill.
You are in the right place.
I promise this story is worth your time. My aim is to change the way you think about the products you search for, how you use them, and what you should expect in return. Not a greener version of the same thinking. Something genuinely different.
It is a true story of how a phone call for T-shirts became...
And you will never guess where it ends up.
An executive assistant at a growing engineering firm called and asked about printing T-shirts for an upcoming event. Before confirming whether we could do it, we asked her about the event, why T-shirts, and what she wanted them to achieve.
I need T-shirts; can you do it or not?
We printed the shirts.
A few weeks later, she called again, this time for giveaways for a trade show. We asked the same questions. It was a last-minute order, and she needed it done. We provided the giveaway. But we planted a seed.
The next show was two months away. We asked the same questions again. This time they listened. This time we were allowed to suggest a strategy.
The day after the show, we received a call from an ecstatic engineer. The qualified leads for both sales and recruitment were unlike anything they had seen at a trade show before.
We followed up a week later. None of the leads had been contacted. We advised them to reach out before the conversations went cold. A week passed. Still no follow-up.
He wanted a meeting. He began by asking what had happened. They had spent tens of thousands of dollars on the show and had nothing to show for it. We explained the follow-up gap. He shook his head and asked what we would suggest. That conversation led us to build a proprietary lead management tool designed specifically for the trade show context, because the gap between attention and commitment was not unique to this client. It was showing up in every booth at every show.
He then told us something that changed the relationship entirely.
We were driving his staff crazy with all the why questions. And this was good. No one had ever asked those questions before.
He told us about a recruitment project. He had a target of hiring one senior engineer from the United Kingdom. He gave us complete strategic and creative control.
We helped him hire three.
The competition brought cowboy hats to London. We built a relocation album. Every page answered a question a family asks before making an irreversible decision across an ocean. The back cover held a note inviting them to fill the album with their own memories when they joined the team in Canada.
That was the beginning of a decade-long relationship. We created a company-wide corporate apparel and branded merchandise program that enabled departments and individuals across multiple offices nationwide to place orders. The CEO funded the program. We watched the company grow from 300 to 1,200 employees.
It began with a T-shirt order from an executive assistant who just wanted to know whether we could do it.
As CEO of a consulting engineering company, I had seen us for years give away marketing materials for seemingly little real return. It was frustrating to see resources being literally thrown away. There had to be a better way.
I first got involved with David because he was driving our marketing staff crazy. We were just trying to buy stuff, and he was asking us why we were buying it and what outcomes we were expecting. Outcomes? What did he mean? We just gave it away because everyone else gave it away.
I came to realize that, unwittingly, I had found an answer to my frustration. David taught us that every giveaway was actually an opportunity to get something back and we had better figure out what we wanted. He didn't give up and we came to understand the power of real marketing.
We were headed to the UK to try to recruit talented staff. However, we were going with our competition, who were also going to try to hire these same folks. David's solution? A focused marketing effort that played to the move that our potential employees would have to make. It was expensive. But it left the potential employees with a massively great impression about who they were talking to, a company that was serious about moving them across an ocean and that cared about quality. Our competition brought hats. We hired three senior staff on that trip. Our goal was one.
I would strongly recommend David to you if you worry about your marketing budget. I guarantee he will change your perspective on those throw-away costs. I have found the more freedom you give him, the more you will get. Your costs will actually go up. But you will find that each giveaway leads to sales leads. Or potential recruits. Or something you had not planned. But it will be good.
Paul Ruffell
CEO, EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd.
Decade-long partnership · 300 to 1,200 employees
You came looking for T-shirts, conference bags, water bottles, or swag. Before any product is chosen, three questions are worth sitting with.
These are not marketing questions. They are the questions nobody asked before us. And they are the reason the outcomes on this page happened at all.
These three questions look simple. They are not. Most organizations answer them from within their own assumptions, which is precisely where the dysfunction lives. The questions yield the right answers only when asked by someone standing outside the system that created the problem. And three well-answered questions are just the beginning. They open a door. What is behind it requires a different kind of conversation entirely.
Five percent of the result is product choice. Ninety-five percent is the thinking that precedes it.
There is a temptation, after reading this far, to conclude that the answer is better swag. A more beautiful object. A more sustainable material. A more on-brand design.
That is the fallacy this page exists to compost.
Most people use swag like a shiny fishing lure with no line and no hook. They throw it into the water and attract lots of fish drawn to shiny things, but nothing happens. The fish get bored and swim away.
But you do not need to reach fish. You need to connect with people who can help you achieve your goal.
A better lure attracts more attention, but attention without a system to receive it is just more expensive circling. Commitment requires the line that connects what you offer to something the person on the other side genuinely needs, and the conditions that make saying yes feel like the most natural thing in the world. That is what the three questions in the previous section are really asking. Not what to throw in the water. What system needs to be in place before anything is offered at all.
Some organizations have already taken the first step. They have built a funnel. They have a path, a follow-up sequence, a lead capture system. That is genuinely further than most get. But a funnel still starts from the organization's goal and works backward to the person, asking how do we move them through our process rather than what do they need to feel before they will choose to walk alongside us.
The leap from funnel to Purpose-Ecosystem™ is the leap from processing people to seeing them. From extraction to symbiosis. From a system designed for your goal to a system designed for both sides to genuinely benefit.
That leap is what this page is about. And it begins with three questions nobody asked before us.
You are not our client. The person you need to reach to accomplish the goal behind this order is our shared client. Our job is to see them clearly enough that everything we design together is built for them first.
That orientation changes every conversation we have before anything is ordered. The questions we ask belong in the conversation, where they can do what they were designed to do.
They are the questions that turned a T-shirt order into a decade-long partnership, changed an outreach program from giveaways to a proven behavioural change, reduced accident rates from 12 to zero and saved a quarter million dollars, turned a $50K per year trade show waste into three senior hires, and transformed a giveaway request into programs that lasted a decade and that the federal government used as a model for 40 organizations nationwide.
Book a conversation. We will start with questions that will tear down a wall you never knew existed.
We will start with seven questions that will tear down a wall you never knew existed.
Prefer to reach out directly?
+1 (780) 474 • 6563
We Help Good People Do Better Marketing
Do Better Marketing
(a division of Avatar Brand Management Inc.)
Do Better Marketing sees the person behind the role. That act of seeing has protected forests, changed how business leaders see domestic violence, and hired senior engineers. Marketing Triage™. Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design. Dimensional Advertising™. Symbiotic Systems Methodology. GreenMeets™. Edmonton, Alberta.
Promotional Products Edmonton · Branded Merchandise Edmonton · Custom T-Shirt Printing Edmonton · DTF Printing Edmonton
© 2026 All Rights Reserved
