Digital photo frames are growing in popularity with everyone, and one unique area is their use as marketing or employee gifts. Despite the recent faltering economy, there is still a market for these type of business related gifts. Gifts for customers or key alliance partners will always be part of a business marketing strategy, and companies still need to reward their employees through employee favors. These gifts change depending on industry and company type, but one intelligent company gift to consider is a digital picture frame.

Digital picture frames are a growing consumer electronic following on the coat tails of digital photos. Since so many people now have transitioned to digital cameras and digital pictures, it only makes sense that they would desire picture frames that can display their collection of digital photos. Digital picture frames are still a relative new category of consumer electronics, and often they are purchased as gifts or by home decorators. One specific area where they are becoming more popular is with corporate gifts.

Companies use gifts to recognize key customers, as well as key partners and even vendors. Most times these gifts are something unique that stands out, and the monetary value of the gift is less significant than the act of the gift itself. Businesses usually want to find something unique, leading edge, or relevant to their industry when choosing a favor for customers or partners. Of course this varies significantly from industry to industry, but the characteristics of business gifts do seem to be similar with many companies.

Likewise, companies often incentivize employees with gifts either during bonus time or to signify certain events like years of service. Critical sales people frequently receive a gift for achieving quota, or employees may receive a favor for their 5, 10, 20 year anniversary with the company. Again, companies frequently want to offer a gift that is unique, useful, or customized to the event, and you'll find human resource departments constantly looking for the latest cool gadgets as gifts for quality employees.

One product that meets this criteria is digital frames. Since digital photo frames are relative new consumer electronics products, many people don't yet own one, thus making them great gifts. Since digital cameras and photography are almost universal, digital photo frames are also something most employees could immediately use. So many people have digital pictures stored away on laptops that a new digital photo frames would immediately enable them to start displaying them in their home.

Businesses that want to use digital frames as corporate gifts for business partners also have more options. Digital picture frames can be easily customized by pre-loading them with images, whether it be promotional pictures of company marketing material, product images, or joint customer-vendor material. A digital picture frame allows a marketing department to readily use their creativity in customizing a gift with any type of media most applicable for the gift purpose or recipient. It can also be as simple as pictures from recent joint customer-vendor events pre-loaded into a slideshow that automatically plays as soon as the frame is unwrapped and turned on.

Of course the financial factor of any gift is a factor to companies, which is also making digital frames viable corporate gifts today as well. As prices of digital photo frames fall to below $200 (and some under $100), they can now easily become customer gifts or employee gifts. This trend should continue.