If you read last year’s State of the Industry report, you’d probably think things couldn’t get much better for the promotional products industry.

Well think again.

The latest total for distributor sales, according to researchers at Baylor University, is – are your ready? -- $14,937 billion, a 13.3% increase over the year before and an even healthier clip than the 1997-98 rise of 10.9%. Coincidentally, ASI’s figure taken directly from its database of listed distributors is $14.5 billion. Not bad, eh? Naturally, the biggest firms still generate a nice chunk of business – combined distributor Top 25/Sales Leaders sales for 1999 totaled $4.6 billion, a whopping 27.7% increase over 1998.

But as we’ve said many times before, that’s less than a third of the industry’s total sales, which means there’s still plenty of room for the smaller operators in the industry to make a buck – billions of them, in fact. And as we’ve also noted previously, the State of the Industry is designed for everyone in the promotional products industry – to be both inspirational and instructive to those looking for benchmarks to measure their performance against.

But before we get started, a word of explanation to help make such comparisons easier and clearer. When tallying SOI survey responses, there are basically two ways to go – averages and medians. The first involves basic arithmetic: Add up everything and divide by the number of responses. Unfortunately, this method is subject to what’s known as “skewing”, where a couple of extremely high or extremely low numbers can throw traditional averages out of whack.

That’s why we prefer to use medians whenever possible, which are calculated by examining all the responses we receive for a particular question and selecting the number that lies dead center – the mid-point in the full range of responses. Statisticians say this method is the more accurate of the two, although it does occasionally produce what at first may seem like marginally useful numbers. For example, the chart on page 125 shows the median number of part-time salespeople employed by suppliers as zero.

Now, we all know plenty of suppliers who have part-time salespeople. But the cold, statistical truth is that the vast majority doesn’t, according to the hundreds of responses we received to this question. If, for example, 90% of the surveys say zero and the other 10% say they employ two, three or eight part-time salespeople, zero (the median figure) is more reflective of the reality at most supplier firms than, say, 0.43 part-time salespeople per supplier – which is what you’d get if you calculated a straight average.

So with that in mind, we now invite you to check out the following analysis of key areas like revenues & expenditures, operations & facilities, markets & marketing and technology & the Internet – the dozens of charts, graphs and critical insights that make up The Counselor’s State of the Industry report for the year 2000.