40 www.ceotodaymagazine.com Stephen Taylor CEO of Propaganda and Sweet Concepts How do Propaganda and Sweet Concepts innovate and stay ahead of the competition? Business is always a highly competitive ever changing landscape that requires continual efforts to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. Product and service innovation are key to staying relevant and fresh. Long gone are the old days of buyer loyalty, today you are only ever one click away from losing your buyers. We innovate and regularly offer new innovative promotional gifts, whilst always ensuing our service levels remain exceptionally high. Never be afraid to look back and change what you’ve done as businesses need to constantly evolve. What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a CEO, and how have you overcome them? Staying relevant is important and all business, especially product and service based business, rely heavily on good teams of people. This has got significantly harder after the pandemic and appears no sign of getting any easier. So the two R’s have never been more relevant namely Recruitment and Retention. Finding the right people with the right attitudes has probably never been harder with the younger generations entering the work place, many with a false sense of hard work and responsibility and accountability in the work place. People are looking for more flexible/home working opportunities, but certain jobs require a more traditional office based approach, so home working simply doesn’t work. However, it is easy to get creative with what you can offer such as flexi arrangement, adjusting working hours, allowing more time off, and being accommodating as possible if people request to take short notice days off. Look to see what you can offer that doesn’t compromise the business but adds value for an employee as retention is always better than recruitment. How do Propaganda and Sweet Concepts approach sustainability and social responsibility? The promotional gift market is a small part of the marketing of a business, but carries a disproportionate weight in supply chain ethical evaluation and supplier safety standards. There’s an increasingly keen interest from customers about having all of their products sourced from responsible and ethical manufacturers. In fact, the demand for this as a standard bench mark for supplying promotional products has been growing exponentially over the past 10 years. In more recent years there’s been a heavy move towards recycled and recyclable products, eco / environmentally friendly products, and some customers will only buy products that fulfil these criteria from within this category, even knowing they are sometimes more expensive. The recycled range of promotional product has really grown over the past few years and now includes clothing and other items products made from recycled plastics.
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