The promotional goods market—defined by the trade as items used to promote a product, service or company program, including advertising specialties, premiums, incentives, business gifts, awards, prizes, commemoratives, and other imprinted or decorated items—is a market highly dependent upon print. The promotional goods market is worth over $65 billion at retail values worldwide (~$21 billion in North America), accounting for about 10% of the marketing communication industry. It co-exists with direct mail, television, social media, and print advertising. The value of promotional products is in their ability to carry a message to a well-defined audience. Because the products are rarely discarded (about 25% are passed on to others), the advertising message keeps paying dividends well beyond one-time views of most other advertising modalities.

The promotional goods market and its associated print requirement has run under the radar of the print industry due to its high fragmentation of product, print technology, and distribution channels. It is a market that has been surprisingly difficult to disrupt from a distribution perspective, despite attempts by on-line print providers due to high-degree of hand holding by print providers to small, local businesses.

It is a market that is moving away from mass-market, low-value goods (e.g., thousand of calendars with the insurance company name at the bottom) to higher-value, higher-quality, and more limited quantities of wearables and plastic-based goods like drinkware, etc. Digital printing technology is eliminating set-up costs (for screens, plates, etc.), allowing for economically viable shorter-runs, of higher-value, often-photographic output quality products. With increasing consumer appreciation and demand for higher output quality products, the industry is starting to see the rapidly growing personalized promotional goods market overlap and even displacement some of the conventionally printed promotional goods market.