Viacommunity is an internal department of entertainment leader Viacom who hosts such prestigious award ceremonies as MTV, CMT and BET. Its mission is simple and noteworthy: to better the communities in which Viacom serves and make a positive social impact on the people and areas in which its employees work and live. Real, lasting, far-reaching differences in the areas of education, health, environment and citizenship. The organization asked Society Awards to design and manufacture awards for their philanthropic and community outreach programs, Get Schooled and their own internal Spirit Awards.  

Trends like luxury toast – seriously, luxury toast – are to blame for your holiday gifting troubles this year. Luxury, it seems, has grown a broad definition where, with marketing spin, it can be just about anything. Luxury ice, garbage cans, doorstops, vacuums and so the list could continue ad infinitum.

So, how do we spoil the people we care about this holiday season? Money alone doesn’t buy it. The brands that create true luxury do so through masterful control of the nuances; it’s the details by which a luxury gift succeeds or fails.

When gifting corporately this season, or any time, as with all relationship building exercises, think about what you want to achieve first.

At Society Awards we take gifting seriously – we custom design our own gifting platforms, and we also utilize our own great selection of readymade designs. When we think about corporate gifting, we treat it like any other branding initiative and consider strategy first: what objectives are we trying to achieve?

In my small company, everyone helps customers.  Everyone is educated, capable, smart and interesting.  We’re well spoken, intelligent human beings.  When a customer calls (or emails) I want the first thing they notice to be that they have reached a human – a helpful, friendly human who appreciates their contact and is an expert in the product category, who is interested to know all about the customer’s needs, and who has set aside the whole world to focus exclusively on giving full attention to that customer.  As opposed to someone who is keeping up a wall of impersonality, or who is apparently busy or disengaged. Customers will quickly realize that they have reached a friendly person who is there to help them.