2008 Incentive Merchandise IQ Report April 07, 2008 Incentive's latest research shows the incentive merchandise market is doing well
By Leo Jakobson
The amount of money corporate incentive planners are spending on merchandise awards is on the rise. We saw this in a number of ways in this year's Merchandise IQ report: The per participant spend has gone up in far more programs than it has gone down, as you'll see; and the average budget for merchandise incentive programs increased about 4 percent, after accounting for a change in the question since 2007. Beyond that, the number of respondents who reported budgets of more than $50,000 increased by about one-third.
There were some setbacks. Compared with 2007, slightly fewer companies are replacing travel programs with merchandise and slightly more are replacing merchandise with travel. That said, travel-to-merchandise was still three times more common