3rd June 2020
Cobranding is when two different brands come together to promote and market their products and services in collaboration. In recent years, comarketing has taken a significant trend amongst companies. These collaborations have proven to be a potent marketing tactic.
Comarketing takes place when brands join their products together, retailers often place advertisements in movies and shows together, or they partner with a celebrity or an influencer to represent their brand.
In cobranding marketing, brands pool their creativity, team, resources, and existing customer base to establish a product having synergy that reaches a greater audience that otherwise is difficult to reach functioning as a separate business.
By sharing the work, their workload is reduced, and the results are multiplied. By teaming up and sharing their creativity, individual risks are also reduced, and equal exposure is given to brands involved in the campaign. This is called a win-win situation.Imagine your brand collaborating with another bigger brand and your company’s logo design being showcased on all channels to show this union.
In most cases, cobranding products market themselves. Just consider Doritos Locos Taco by Taco Bell or Yeezy’s by Kanye West, a Collaboration with Addidas that benefited both Kanye West and Addidas. You will find hundreds of product reviews from amateurs reviewers and YouTubers to seasoned critics. That’s a kind of promotion that you would never be able to get through commercials and billboards.
Cobranding collaborations can massively improve your business dynamics, increase your business reach, drive brand recognition and awareness, increase sales, and esteem. To help your brand with cobranding, we have listed down eight tips below.
Make Sure You Have Different Offerings
You want to stand out. If you’re cobranding with another brand, make sure you’re bringing something to the table that has never been offered before, or the experience you are providing them is unmatched in the industry.
To engage with your customers, you need to give them incentives that they will not find anywhere else. Co-partnerships like these have been incredibly successful, especially when consumers believe they are getting something precious from the union of both the brands. If they feel like you having nothing special to offer, they will not engage with your brand.
You should be partnering with a brand that has a similar tone and lifestyle to your brand. You want to pick a brand that has the same vision, long term goals, target audience, brand tone. If you choose a brand that is entirely different from yours, your customers will have a hard time digesting and relating to the collaboration. Therefore, you need to choose a brand with products and services that are strictly related to your own brand.
If you want to impress your customers, pick a brand that will make your brand look better in front of your consumers. It should reflect your brand positively and increase its brand value in a positive light. People will start associating your brand the way they perceive your partner. Therefore you need to make sure the brand has a favorable market image so you can also benefit from it.
It can be a tough job integrating two brands into one through cobranding. Some brands are significant on their own and hardly need the shoulders of other brands, but your brand could use this partnership. Therefore, you must find some similarities between the two brands that join them together.
For example, if you are a makeup company, it would make sense to collaborate with a skin and hair care company. It will also be ideal if you have a makeup artist or a hairstylist as your spokesperson and brand ambassador. This way, your customers will not be swayed away by the other brand’s presence and will have more to look forward to in this collaboration.
A successful cobranding tactic is to have a particular marketing promotion focused on one brand while the other brand pays a small role in supporting it. For example, you are a sports gear brand, and you decide to cobrand with a protein supplement company.
In your marketing campaign, you can massively focus on your sports brand, but take a small moment to highlight the partner company’s participation and involvement by talking about the right gear with the proper protein intake that can benefit your brand.
Co- partnering can confuse your target audience easily. So, instead of showing several logos on one screen, try to focus on one brand at a time. Also, make sure you don’t show all the brands too much at the same time during a video commercial. Use visual techniques to get your audience’s attention from one brand to another.If you’re collaborating on websites, make sure your web design is simple and not overcrowded with graphics.
Cobranding tactics are beneficial when they are benefiting both the brands involved. Even when it’s useful for your sales and marketing efforts, you should make sure that the core message you send on behalf of the involved brands doesn’t interfere with your word.
Any marketing campaign you participate in, including cobranding, should be pertinent to your brand. It should be meaningful and reflect your brand strategy. There should be compelling reasons and offering in your comarketing that will make your consumers interested in this partnership. If it’s something completely different from what you actually provide, then your brand might lose the plot of engaging your customers.
If you own a small business, you need to protect your business. Small businesses often overlook partnering with other brands. For the following reasons:
Nonetheless, with a proper cobrand and well-planned strategy and execution, your brand will be able to penetrate its customers and enhance the perceived value. If your cobrand is already a successful brand, then you have all the more reasons to collaborate with them.
The digital world is where online strategy meets storytelling. If you go on Instagram and Facebook and check any small or big business, you will see they have influencers, bloggers, or even celebrities reviewing and endorsing their offerings. This is comarketing at a very micro level, but it’s still useful for these businesses. Their campaigns run on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and now even TikTok and Snapchat.
The digital media cobranding aspect provides brands enough space to sell their business while successfully reaching their target audience at one time. So, if you’re a small business that functions online, try reaching out to similar brands in the same industry as yours. You can start by emailing or messaging them through Instagram and Facebook while keep working on your individual brand. Once you hear back from them, it will be easier to take things forward.
Need help with content that goes well with your cobranding? Give us a call. We have the appropriate tools and the experience to make your cobranding a massive success!