Rick Brenner, MAS+

Creating Lightbulb Moments Using Your Own Data

Connected devices are on the rise, but what we don’t know can hurt our industry and clients.

Yikes! We’re barely past the halfway point of 2016 and already a whopping $25 million in civil penalties has been assessed against businesses this year for product safety violations. A civil penalty is a fine levied by a regulatory agency of the federal government—in this case, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the agency charged with protecting consumers against unsafe products.

Having returned from PPAI’s most recent highly acclaimed Product Responsibility Summit, I am more and more convinced that our industry is inching closer to a tipping point, where the standards required for a successful promotional products business are materially different than those of just a few years ago. I raise this point now, before it becomes universal, because as chair of our 11,000-member association, it is my hope that all PPAI members emerge as winners in this brave new world. However, I fear that unless everyone ramps up their efforts to evolve, that may not be the case.