Just before Christmas last year we asked 100 Now  readers about the corporate gifts they send and receive. On compiling the data it was Santa's wine, spirits and, most of all, his next day courier suppliers, that had the best grounds for Christmas cheer.

From what you've told us, the typical corporate Christmas gift starts at about £20 (although routinely you're spending between £40 and £100+ on "best customers"). An SME employing between 20- 50 people tends to spend about £450 on cards and small gifts alone.  Larger companies spend slightly less per employee but budgets for seasonal greeting cards can become difficult to calculate here because departmental heads frequently take their own initiatives and resource activities from their own departmental budgets. 

More often than not, the gifts you give come in the shape of a bottle (which is frequently accompanied with an array of fine preserves and sweetmeats encased in some form of rattan weaved basket). For more than 80 percent of you, the gifts you receive from suppliers look remarkably similar to the ones you sent out; which is probably why nine out of ten of you say  you can't actually recall a single instance of one card or gift actually achieving any marketing objective at all. In the blitz of greetings that clutter the corporate grotto over Christmas, creative marketing communications are lost in the glitter and tinsel; so why bother?

For the past two years here at Now, we've been running a programme we call "Red Card the Christmas Card". It's a proactive programme that accepts that any cash spent on cards and gifts is proven to deliver little or no results in terms of marketing effectiveness and instead hooks up with UNICEF to use the money to buy school supplies for kids in the third word. "Red Card the Christmas Card" banners are bolted-on to the outgoing emails sent by everyone on the team to warn all clients and prospects not to wait pensively by the letter box for the Now chrimbo communication. Embedded hyperlinks allow anyone interested to jump onto the Now web pages that explain what we're doing and why.

Over the month of December we calculate that about 3,700 people receive personal emails from the Now team that incorporate this greeting: far more people than we'd include in any marcomms driven card mailing programme.

Since launching the "Red Card the Christmas Card" campaign two years ago we've had no one lament the business' decision not to send a greeting or gift and, for the month of December, the "Red Card the Christmas Card" pages have constantly been the highest ranking on the Now web site. In short: the tactic seems to make sense to the prospect community our business depends on, gets more attention than classic card mailings ever did, drives prospects to our site and actually does something useful with a relatively small budget.

Whether by design or default, all marketing departments are inevitably charged with managing formal business comms activity as the Christmas period gets underway, so when you're pulled in to the company brainstorm that's almost certain to take place over the next days or weeks, put the "Red Card the Christmas Card" tactic on the table and see what happens.  Next to the personally engraved decanter, golf balls or personal organiser samples, it might just catch the eye.