Swagonomics: inside the wild world of corporate gifting, from AirPods to owls

The package arrived at Ramp’s Miami office looking nothing like a sales pitch. Inside was a huge cage housing a snowy owl, reminiscent of Hedwig from Harry Potter. Employees stopped working to gawk at it, wondering if the mystifying owl was real.

The recipient, Kendall Tucker — Director of Creative Experimentation at Ramp — opened the attached card and learned that the sender was a company called Wildcard, which builds one-to-one gifting campaigns for high-value targets. They had read one of her old blogs, where she’d written about waiting for a letter from Hogwarts as a child.

Tucker loved the gift. “When I sent the photo to what we call the Growth Watercooler channel at Ramp, a bunch of people thought it was a real owl, which I think would have been unhinged,” Tucker said.

“We had a real internal debate on if we should send a real owl, which I'm happy we did not, but yeah,” Wildcard co-founder Brennan Keough told Leading Indicators. “We really pushed the envelope, because that's what works.”

While the owl was fake, the attention it drove was real. The thought and effort behind the gift were evident, and Tucker was excited to get on the phone. Wildcard had accomplished the most difficult part of selling: getting noticed.

What it takes to get a meeting

Though most people don’t receive intricate life-size birds, you’ve probably received a gift from a company at some point in your life. It could be as small as a branded beer coozie at a conference, or as big as a YETI cooler after sitting through a sales call.

At a time when AI slop is everywhere and outreach is cheap, companies are leaning on physical gifting more than ever to cut through the digital noise. They’re shipping AirPods, grills, and custom-made gifts to get decision-makers’ attention.

Alexa Jacques, senior performance marketing manager at Ramp, said there are three main buckets of corporate gifting.

The first is direct mail, Jacques said, giving postcards as an example (snail mail doesn’t have to be boring). The second bucket is an incentive, often to book a sales meeting. “This is usually like: take a demo and we'll send you AirPods or some other gadget,” Jacques said. The third category is personalized, bespoke gifts like the Wildcard owl. 

Gifting platforms like Goody now let sales teams send gifts at scale and measure those channels against paid ads. We spoke with Goody CEO Katy Carrigan to learn more about the ROI math.

“You look at, how much is it actually costing us on LinkedIn to set a meeting?” Carrigan said, adding that a meeting acquired through LinkedIn ads might cost her company around $1,000. “But then I do it and I offer people an incentive to take a meeting with us to get AirPods or a Yeti cooler,” Carrigan said, noting that those are the highest-converting gifts on Goody, “and now all of a sudden it's costing me $300 to get a meeting.”

Several studies on human psychology have shown the principle of reciprocity, the norm where people respond to a positive action (like a gift) with another positive action (like taking a meeting). Restaurants often leave mints or candy with a bill to increase tips, and it really works.

Goody shared data from samples of around 10,000 prospects showing that sales teams booked 3.7 times more meetings when they used Goody, and BDRs got 80% more replies when gifts were included in outreach.

The viral power of gifting

Ramp spend data found that corporate gifting spend has increased among businesses, with the largest gains concentrated in a small number of programs.

&Open, the Irish gifting company, showed one of the largest year-over-year increases in business spending among the top 10 gifting platforms on Ramp.

“It becomes really powerful to tell somebody they're getting a gift, give them some engagement with it, and then deliver that gift a few days later,” Jonathan Legge, CEO of &Open, told Leading Indicators.

Gifts can work as marketing, too. A good example of this is &Open’s gifting campaign for OpenAI. OpenAI sent physical “tokens of appreciation” plaques to customers who reached usage milestones (think: the YouTube Play Buttons of the AI world).

Recipients shared photos of their awards online, and the campaign went viral. "Less than 24 hours after we handed them out, the views on Twitter exceeded 1.3 million," the company said.

Standing out in a digital world

For companies whose products and presence are entirely digital (as many tech companies are today) physical gifting makes the relationship feel tangible.

“With a SaaS business, or a native AI business, your existence is fundamentally digital,” Legge said. “And so those moments to have relationships with a brand are really limited.”

That’s why it’s so important to get them right and make them count.

“I'll talk to my team all the time about encouraging our customers to send out less gifts,” Legge said. “It should be about quality and intentionality, because we learned early days from just watching brands get it wrong because their positioning wasn't aligned with the type of gifting they want to do.”

Wildcard’s Keough said the company has an internal test to make sure gifting outreach feels intentional and doesn’t push the envelope too far.

“The test we use is if the sales rep got onto an elevator with the end prospect and they had three floors, and the sales rep looked at the exec and said, ‘Hey, I saw this on your LinkedIn. It made me think of X, so I wanted to give you this gift. Could I talk to you about what we do sometime?’”

If the exec wouldn’t respond positively and understand the intention behind the gift, they wouldn’t send it.

The bottom line:

When outreach is cheap, attention is expensive. The surge in corporate gifting and the new companies and strategies that have emerged around it are a reflection of our time. So much of outreach is now digital, regulated, and oversaturated. The physical nature of gifts makes them harder to ignore. Gifts don’t go to spam, and they don’t have to stop the scroll because they’re right in front of you.

But gifts are also hard to take back. When done wrong, they can blow through a budget much faster than cheaper options and might lead to the wrong kind of attention. But when done right, they’re an extremely powerful tool that can flip the usual sales interaction. Instead of asking a stranger to give you their time first, you begin by showing them what kind of company you are.

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