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A mug is a mug is a mug. That’s why Quality Logo Products spends so much time on marketing and customer service.

The company has 80 employees at its Aurora, Ill. headquarters. Forty percent of them, with the exception of the accounting department, are in IT, content and media marketing.

They are in charge of what sets Quality Logo Products apart from others that do what they do: The company’s website.

It includes a peppy and entertaining blog and equally conversational and entertaining product descriptions. (Take this one for the Bic Clic Stic Pen, which declares “You haven’t truly written something until you have written it using a Bic Clic Stic Pen.” Wow!)

Another feature allows you to actually get a 360 degree view of many products (see above), giving an even better sense of what customers will get when ordering. Mandy Kilinskis, content and social team manager said:

“We kind of have this fun, quirky feel to our websites.”

This emphasis on marketing as a differentiator isn’t anything new for the 11-year-old company, Kilinskis adds. It was stamped on the business’s DNA from the day Co-Owners and Co-Founders Bret Bonnet and Michael Wenger started it back in college.

You see, Quality Logo Products is a commercial products distributor. That means it doesn’t make the products it sells. It also means there’s no graphics department. (They don’t create your logo or even place your logo on merchandise.)

What the company does do is arranges a comprehensive list of available products on its website. (There are about 25,000 items in all, 4,000 pens alone!) They then source products from the factory, negotiate for the best prices, have supplied artwork added and ship directly to the customer.

All of this happens behind the scenes, however. Quality Logo Products competes head to head with lots of other companies that also supply promotional products.

This competition can range from much larger companies like Staples and OfficeMax to much smaller businesses run by a single person with a website. There’s even disruption from print on demand companies like CafePress.com, admits Kilinskis. But since these kinds of businesses make and ship only one product at a time as orders come in, they are generally not competitive on price.

With so many companies offering potentially similar products and services, getting customers’ attention remains an important strategy.

That also goes for the company’s offbeat YouTube channel …read more