Collaborative marketing, done right, is one of the best growth strategies, although it is not without its headaches.
When I was building my company, I relied heavily on cold outreach. It was an area I was familiar with and knew I could leverage effectively.
But building a brand that way would take forever.
And building a brand was the path I wanted to follow. From the moment I discovered that companies could have a relatively small value, but their brands could be worth millions, I became obsessed with building a brand.
My brand would become my exit plan, my insurance and my pension.
One small drawback: I had no idea how to do it.
I was working in a sector that was ideal for brand building. Consumer goods sold B2B, in the mid-high market segment. Very conducive.
Meanwhile, cold calling was still working, word of mouth was starting to spread, and we were building up a good number of repeat customers. But we were certainly not a brand.
No one was running to the stores shouting our name, saying, “I have to have one of those.”
In fact, even if the end consumer was delighted with the product, most still had no idea who had made it.
We scratched our heads and did the usual branding stuff:
Investing in the design of our logo, website and packaging. Anything that could be branded, was.
We work tirelessly to ensure consistency of our message across all channels.
And I stepped into an uncomfortable place, going out to promote our story and becoming the face of the brand.
Still, nothing. Zero.
Our business customers were not interested in anything beyond how their current order was going. The end customer who bought from them still had no idea who we were.
And then I realized. 💡💡💡
They didn’t listen to us because the middlemen, the companies we sold to, took all the credit and we had no visibility.
It wasn’t helpful at all for building a brand.
We had sales and a healthy small market share. Our products were popular.
But as far as brand recognition goes, still zero.
Again and again, I would flip through the luxury magazines and admire the double-page spreads of the big brands and their national lists of distributors.
If only we had tens of thousands to spend on advertising like that.
Better late than never, I started toying with the idea of co-marketing (also known as collaborative marketing).
This is a process in which two or more companies work together to promote services or products for mutual benefit.
Double the rewards at half the cost.
I thought how perfect this would be.
There have been some famous—and fabulously successful—marketing partnerships over the years. Examples include:
Apple was a master of collaborative marketing and one example of this was working with Nike, which integrated Apple technology into its products.
Red Bull and GoPro — Red Bull organised extraordinary events and GoPro cameras were used to film them.
Volvo became the officially recognized car of LegoLand, a perfectly aligned partnership between family-oriented brands.
Intel came up with a campaign called “Intel Inside” where they could appear with their brand on other computer manufacturers’ products. It was a springboard for them to become leaders.
Hmm, I thought. I could use some of that.
But who would want to partner with us, a small company that almost no one had heard of?
Then it finally occurred to me.
Maybe, just maybe, the answer was our customers. But only if we offered them something that would bring them enough benefit.
There are four main reasons why companies on either side of the deal consider co-marketing:
- To share resources such as technology or social networks
- To reach customers that the partner can attract, but had not yet reached
- To increase the credibility of one or both parties in the market
- To share marketing or advertising costs
I knew my business clients were short on time, so sharing marketing activity wouldn’t be of much interest to them.
However, they would always be interested in the possibility of new clients, increasing their reputation in the market and doing all that at the minimum cost.
I thought about those double-page spreads in the luxury magazines. I thought about how some of my smaller clients would love to reach the readers of those magazines, but couldn’t afford it. And how none of them would want to risk being left out of a new, exclusive list.
So I did the math. The cost of full-page and double-page ads was in the thousands and up. But when you start dividing that up among fifty or sixty companies, the sums involved become smaller.
For just three figures, companies that signed up to the scheme could improve their reach, attract new customers and be seen as part of an extremely exclusive group of suppliers for their geographic area.
It was an easy sale.
For us, it was a victory beyond our wildest dreams.
Suddenly, our name kept popping up in all the right places. Overnight, we were one of the small handful of high fashion names in the industry. People who would never have heard of us before were now demanding our products.
We had become “a brand.”
And all for a minimal cost.
Of course, there were drawbacks.
Most of these came about because I jumped in without doing any market research and didn’t look at what was going to happen as a result of the campaign.
Many of the problems revolved around the word “distributors.”
One little word—that could cause so much trouble.
Most high-end fabric companies only have “samples” of their products at their distributors, not vast arrays of each fabric they sell. Kitchen and bath companies are the same. Retailers don’t stock every item, just a selection.
So I fondly thought it would work the same for us and our furniture. But no.
The phones rang with irritated customers who had visited a dealer and had been unable to see the B nightstand in light blue. They were, for the most part, manageable, but a lot more work than I had anticipated.
But there were worse problems.
We were so busy selling the concept that we didn’t stop to see if a potential partner’s style and values were completely aligned. We should have personally inspected each store.
Not doing so meant a very varied mix of quality and style. But also of ethics.
Each dealer received a discount on what they purchased for their showrooms. Some bought more than others.
We were particularly impressed with one showroom owner, who placed several extremely lucrative orders. They assured us that they loved the product and were filling every corner of their showroom.
We woke up. We had directed a member of the public there, naively thinking there would be plenty of stock to choose from.
Nothing. Not a single piece in place.
Stupidly, we had left ourselves completely exposed to a huge scam: customers buying “for their showroom,” but actually offering our discounts to their customers to undercut the competition.
Oh.
Less tangible, but eventually more draining, was that once selected as suppliers, clients often felt they deserved more.
What “more” meant, beyond advertising and discounted products, wasn’t entirely clear, but a sense of dissatisfaction seeped into our relationships that hadn’t been there before. We listened and we learned.
It was a difficult and sad road to see the dissatisfaction because it was really a good deal. But expectations are always difficult to manage.
However, despite the drawbacks, I would do collaborative marketing campaigns again and again.
Collaborative marketing, done well, is one of the best growth strategies.
It’s not without its headaches. Brand research and alignment are crucial.
But if you want your brand name to skyrocket in innovative ways and at a moderately low cost, then marketing collaboration is unbeatable.
