I'd like to argue that most of the marketing spend by startups on items like tshirts, hats, flyers are an utter waste of money.

So how do you build a brand on a single campus? Then do it consistently on other campuses? By anally focusing on the bottomline: getting students to use your damn product. 

Now, go back to my original argument about tshirts, flyers etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. In fact, they can all work. But the tshirt is not the strategy. Doing the leg work to calculate the # of tshirts it takes to get x number of users on average is the strategy. Most startups that go the whole give-stuff-away route are really copping out from their real duty of meticulously creating a marketing plan which at its backbone is focused on quantitative measurable results.

For college campuses, the best example is RedBull. How many times have you see some random dude on campus with a redbull tshirt on? Very few. How often do I see RedBull chicks giving out free RedBull? Very often! RedBull is not leaving it up to luck and randomness that you might end up trying and liking their product. No, they have it down to a formula that if x number of their reps on y number of campuses give out z number of cans, over the longterm they can make _____ dollars of profit.

The exception....

Here's what tshirts and other free goodies pushing your brand are really good for: making you and your team feel good. Wearing my brand's tshirt does not really make me more passionate(probably because I've hit a ceiling) but the idea of seeing your team, wearing the same t-shirt, can be uplifting. This goes back to psychology 101.

Another thing...if you have money and you can give away TONNES of tshirts, it may help you SOLIDIFY your branding. But here's the deal: branding does not equal business. Just because tonnes of people have heard of Redbull does not mean tonnes or even a fraction will try it out.

So if you are doing a tshirt campaign or a flier campaign, you have to do it at almost a massive level. You cannot have lazy ass people passing out 50 flyers in a marketsize of 20,000 students. It will hardly register. You can pass out 50 flyers every single day for a year and people will barely know your brand. Instead, you may need to pass out 50,000 flyers over the whole year to get ____% brand recognition. And don't be surprised if you have to pass out many many times more to get product use. 

Bottomline: (a) know why you are giving stuff away for free on campus (b) don't do it if you cannot answer A or if you don't have a lot of money to throw.