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Brand partnerships: are you pairing up or pairing off?

By Harriet Ghaui, Marketing manager

December 11, 2017 | 6 min read

A few months have passed and I’m still thinking about the ‘gold baroque crystal encrusted box’ that McDonald’s and Julien Macdonald decided to jointly give to the world. It was a pairing that gave me similar feelings to when I walked past the Magnum x Moschino Pleasure Store in the summer. Was this a step too far for brand partnerships? I checked myself and thought: it’s the summer, the madness will cool down soon.

Harriet Ghaui

But the heat wave is long gone and the same sense of disillusion hit me as I stood in the frozen food aisle of Tesco. I was there to pick up a box of Magnum ice creams but all I could think of was Cara Delevingne and Jeremy Scott releasing a beast for Moschino that I’m not sure will ever get back in the cage.

As markets become increasingly fragmented, brands seem to panic that their offer is not enough. The pressure to hit revenue targets also adds to the frenzy, making them reach desperately for the nearest life jacket.

Whether it’s co-branding, joint-promotion, brand alliance, or a joint venture, when done well any of these partnerships create a sum greater than the whole. They can increase the audience, awareness and revenue of a business. At its best, partnership marketing is the co-creation of ideas to make both partners more effective and give their consumers a more compelling, useful offer.

But everything is happening quicker in marketing terms. The advent of six-second ads – where “one word, one image, one second is enough for someone to be drawn in” according to Mia Kuhn – highlights the accelerated speed brands have to operate at. And as the churn picks up and more tools are launched to create quicker, brands are in danger of rushing to the door of the ark in an unsustainable (and often comical) partnership.

The point of pairing up is to create brand awareness and deliver growth. But when a business fails to value its brand equity and instead trades it in for a short-term sensation, they risk finding themselves in a rudderless state, surrounded by the rocking associations of another brand.

So, how can brands avoid that?

Strategy first, then tactics

Do not let the activity and buzz of a brand partnership replace or cloud the overarching strategy. It makes sense for Sports England to be involved with partnership marketing because its strategy is based on working towards an active nation in an inclusive way. That can’t be done alone. Particularly for This Girl Can, once the aim of getting women active in innovative ways is set, a partnership with Spotify makes sense and reinforces the brand strategy. By contrast, One National Lottery spreads itself across a range of platforms and pairs up in so many directions that the incoherence hinders it, resulting in great causes being overshadowed by Twitter malfunctions and Noel Edmond.

Aim for long term benefits

So, make sure you’re embracing associations that suit your brand, and that it’s mutually beneficial. To go back to the Moschino x Magnum Pleasure Store that pops up in London each summer – it does wonders to elevate the associations of Magnum to a brand that creates bespoke ice cream (yes, that has officially become a thing). But what benefit is Moschino left with other than a financial one?

Complement and thrive

Before you open your doors to partnerships, your own brand needs to be distinctive and strong. A partnership like GoPro and Red Bull works in a balanced way because individually, both brands have strong cores and offers that complement each other. Their joint vision to inspire the world to live a bigger life adds to what they already have – GoPro’s mission to help customers capture and share the world, and Red Bull’s promise to ‘give you wings’ and live a life of adventure.

Diversify, don’t dilute

H&M has long been the leader when it comes to designer collaborations – each year it successfully varies its offer within a framework that its consumers understand and look forward to. And then there’s Taco Bell’s foray into fashion with Forever 21 and pairing with Lyft to release a ‘Taco Mode’ feature for drunk customers. It’s all fun and games until you remember that their main offer is fast food and their numbers are falling.

Remember why you exist

Every brand’s purpose should be deeply rooted in an understanding of its consumers’ needs. If you can reconnect with that, and measure every partnership opportunity against this, you’ll only make choices that pair you up instead of off. Take the latest pairing of Google and Salesforce as an example: Salesforces’ Ryan Aytay said ‘it brings our companies together with one priority: to make our customers smarter and more productive’. The integration of Google Analytics with Salesforce Marketing Cloud had been a top request of Google and Salesforce customers. In delivering for their users’ needs, Google and Salesforce have once more bolstered their individual positions.

Positive brand association is not earned overnight but unfortunately, in this tough and fickle world, it can be drained away or lost entirely in half the time. So, only jump in the river if a) you can swim, and b) you know which way the current will take you.

Harriet Ghaui is marketing manager at The Partners

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