Mightier Than the Sword

The pen is powerful at delivering key messages while at the same time serving as a cost effective advertising medium.

Writing instruments now make up more than 10.6% of the $17.3 billion promotional products industry - that's $1.8 billion. Today's writing instrument is said to have a pass-along rate of at least 7 different users. With a fairly inexpensive cost, wide range of of exposure and long shelf life, pens are a product favorite for advertisers wanting to maximize their marketing dollars by creating the lowest possible cost per impression.

At the beginning of the 19th century, only those who could read and write could proudly display their fountain pens, and they were considered a status symbol. Also during this time, established membership organizations spent time and money to create shield designs - or emblems (early logos) to represent their organizations. To complement this effort, John Jacob Parker introduced the Emblem Pen in 1906, one of the earliest known promotional items and a forerunner to the products of the company's Corporate Markets Division. This pen incorporated the emblems of secret societies, such as the Knights of Columbus. By 1914, the Joseph Lipic Pen Co. began supplying imprinted fountain pens to the specialty advertising industry and the fountain pen became a mainstream promotional product.

The ballpoint pen didn't surface as a promotional product until 1948 when Lipic introduced imprinted ballpoint pens. The ballpoint had been invented ten years earlier, but had a rough start due to reliability issues and consumer discontent. Then with the launch of the new, affordable BIC Crystal, the ballpoint pen made a comeback. With this boom in popularity, other large pen manufacturers began to launch their imprinting divisions.

Advances in today's designs are driven primarily by the retail market. Yet, different global markets have their own design preferences. For example, Europeans prefer a slimmer writing instrument. The colors, grips and barrel thickness are all driven by different market preferences. Today's silk-screening process uses more state of the art inks that dry faster and have greater opacity. While engraving is still a traditional way to imprint a pen - especially metal pens - the technology for this process has also changed drastically. In the past two years, high tech laser engraving has allowed manufacturers to engrave as many as 1,000 pens per hour.

As laptops, PDAs and cell phones become more integrated into our daily lives, what's the future of the pen? Due to their usefulness and the repeated exposure of the advertising message, pens will always be a practical promotional item. From feather quill to ballpoint to PDA stylus the hand held writing instrument will continue to evolve but will remain in our pockets, purses, briefcases desks, cars, kitchen drawers and everywhere else people keep pens handy.

- Cassandra Johnson, Bill Rosen (Bulletline)