When Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, launched a chocolate brand in 2022, plenty of people assumed it would be another celebrity product destined to ride on fame before quietly disappearing.
Instead, Feastables became one of the biggest consumer product success stories of recent years.
The brand generated around US$250 million in sales during 2024, reportedly earning more profit than MrBeast’s enormously successful YouTube business. What began as merchandise adjacent to an online audience evolved into a genuine retail brand found on supermarket shelves and in lunchboxes around the world.
It’s an extraordinary success story, but perhaps the most interesting lesson is about understanding your audience.
Great Products Meet People Where They Already Are
MrBeast could have launched almost anything. With hundreds of millions of followers, virtually every product category would have attracted attention. Instead, he chose chocolate, something remarkably ordinary. This wasn’t accidental.
His audience consisted largely of children and young adults and chocolate already occupied a place in their daily lives. It required no explanation, no behavioural change, and no complicated sales funnel. The product simply fit.
Once people bought their first bar, the experience shifted from being digital to physical. The brand no longer relied on appearing in someone’s social media feed. It was sitting in kitchen cupboards, backpacks and supermarket aisles, quietly reinforcing itself every day. That physical presence became part of the marketing.
Visibility Looks Different Offline
Businesses often think about visibility in terms of impressions, clicks and algorithms.
Digital marketing has trained organisations to chase attention that lasts only a few seconds before disappearing beneath the next piece of content, but physical products operate differently.
A branded coffee cup sitting on someone’s desk isn’t competing against hundreds of other advertisements every few seconds. A reusable drink bottle, notebook or tote bag builds familiarity over weeks, months or even years. The interaction is less intrusive, but often far more frequent.
Research consistently suggests consumers place greater value on useful promotional products than many traditional advertising formats, largely because they continue delivering value long after they are received.
That repeated exposure creates something many marketers spend significant budgets trying to achieve: familiarity. And familiarity often becomes trust.
Promotional Products Are Most Effective When They’re Useful
For more than 25 years, Brisbane-based promotional products specialist Promo Gear has worked with organisations ranging from local businesses through to government departments, universities and major organisations including CSIRO, DFAT and Lite n’ Easy.
Across thousands of campaigns, one pattern has remained remarkably consistent: the most successful promotional products are the ones people genuinely use, not the most expensive ones. For example, a notebook that travels between meetings, a drink bottle carried to the gym, a quality pen that never leaves someone’s desk, or a tote bag used every weekend.
Each interaction becomes another reminder of the business behind it without demanding attention or interrupting someone’s day.
Rather than treating branded merchandise as novelty giveaways, Promo Gear encourages businesses to think more strategically about how products fit naturally into their customers’ lives.
Audience First, Product Second
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding promotional merchandise is that success comes from choosing the latest trending product. In reality, effective campaigns begin much earlier.
Who is the audience? How do they spend their day? What would genuinely make their life easier?
A construction company will have different priorities from a technology firm, and a university open day calls for different products than a corporate conference. The strongest campaigns recognise these differences rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
This mirrors the thinking behind Feastables. MrBeast didn’t simply sell chocolate because it was profitable; he sold it because it made sense for the people he wanted to reach.
Long-Term Thinking Beats Short-Term Attention
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for Australian SMEs is that effective marketing isn’t always about finding new ways to capture attention. Sometimes it’s also about staying present after attention has already been earned.
Digital advertising remains an essential part of modern marketing, but it exists in an increasingly crowded environment where costs continue to rise and consumer attention becomes harder to hold.
Physical promotional products offer something different by becoming part of everyday routines. They’re picked up repeatedly without requiring another advertising budget and they create impressions that feel less like advertising and more like utility. That distinction matters.
Building Brands People Remember
The success of Feastables demonstrates that even in an overwhelmingly digital world, physical products still have extraordinary power because they occupy space in people’s daily lives.
For companies working with promotional merchandise, that means asking a different question. Not “What should we put our logo on?” but rather: “What would our customers actually choose to keep?”
The answer to that question is often where long-term brand recognition begins.
To learn more about Promo Gear and their approach, visit promogear.com.au.
