A brand-to-brand partnership is a collaboration between two non-competing brands that leverage their relationship, resources, experiences, and expertise to generate brand awareness, grow their customer base, and reach a wider audience through innovative and creative campaigns.
In entrepreneurship, partnerships are an essential step in the growth of any business and form such alliances exist in various ways. It can take the form of funding or investments to share technical knowledge and ideas between firms.
Benefits Of Strategic Partnership
- The strategy of business partnerships is a tried, tested, and proven method of growing businesses together. But to create that successful brand partnership, finding common ground is crucial. This means having shared values, principles, vision, and mission that help brands collaborate smoothly.
- Through their innovative collaboration campaigns, brand partnerships help to build brand awareness, widen the customer base, and increase sales. In addition, brand partnerships’ creative approaches help them stand out from their competitors’ offerings.
- Brand-to-brand partnerships help generate additional revenue by leveraging both partners’ resources, experience, and knowledge of technology or application to create a new and innovative product that will help reach a wider audience and acquire new customers.
- Brand alliances allow brands to share operational responsibilities, giving them more time to focus on acquiring new clients or completing other pressing tasks.
- Collaborating with brands that wouldn’t become direct competitors in future helps both brands gain shared customers.
- In addition, the brand partnership helps in the mutual success of both sides, as one brand partner contributes in areas where the other is lacking.
Innovative and Creative Collaborations
- Adidas and Allbirds
Adidas and Allbirds extended a collaborative campaign to a social cause. Adidas is a sportswear company, and Allbirds is an eco-friendly shoe and clothing company focusing on natural materials. Adidas and Allbirds teamed up to create a new ultralight running shoe with a super-low carbon footprint, the lowest one from the brands to date.
Adizero is created from Allbirds’ eco-friendly technology combined with Adidas shoe-making expertise. The upper of the shoe is made of eucalyptus tree fiber from Allbirds and Adidas PrimeGreen, recyclable and sustainable materials. The midsole is made of Allbirds EVA SweetFoam, which is made from sugarcane, and Adidas Lightstrike EVA. The lining and reinforcements for the toe box, midfoot, and heel are made of recycled polyester embroidery.
- Uber and Spotify
Uber and Spotify’s partnership aims to offer superior customer service. Though these brands offer different services, their customer demographics can be very similar. Hence, an innovative collaboration between the music-streaming app and the ride-hailing app can create substantial results.
Uber has teamed up with Spotify to let customers choose the soundtrack for their rides. They get to pick the music they want, which will be on the car’s speakers. They also get an additional option to adjust the volume to their liking or turn off the audio altogether. Customers found this offer interesting and preferred to pick Uber and Spotify, which allowed them to enjoy their next ride while listening to their favorite tunes.
- Levi’s and Pinterest
Levi’s expertise in fashion, combined with Pinterest’s fashion inspiration images, led to the creation of Styled by Levi’s, which provides a customized styling experience and style insights based on the tastes and preferences of each user.
The feature is available on Levi’s microsite and is promoted on Pinterest. Customers choose their top five favorites from various photos and then provide access to Levi’s and Pinterest so that they can create a personalized Pinterest board based on their selections and prior Pinterest activity. The recommendations can include flat photographs of a single product, stylized journalistic images, and pins promoting Levi’s chatbot or its customizing section.
- Nike and Snapchat
Nike collaborated with Snapchat to reach its target audience by utilizing the potential of technology. Nike utilized the opportunities that Snapchat offered as a popular social media platform used by teenagers and young people to reach a young potential audience for promoting its most recent sneaker campaign.
Through a simple but strategic approach, they created a successful campaign that drew the attention of young customers to the brand. Nike gave Snapchat users exclusive access to their shoes’ making process. They were allowed entry to a particular store where they could watch the creation of footwear, access unique content, and learn about the technologies used in the shoes.
- Burger King & McDonald’s
Direct partnerships between rival businesses operating in the same industry are rare. However, one case of the two fiercest fast food sector competitors coming together for a joint marketing effort is Burger King and McDonald’s “A Day Without Whopper” co-branding campaign aimed at a social cause.
For every Big Mac sold, McDonald’s gave $2 to organizations that support children with cancer. Therefore, Burger King launched a campaign called “A Day Without Whopper” and stopped selling its menu to support and boost the sales of its competitor. Burger King put aside their rivalry and market competition to support McDonald’s charity and deliver the more important message that compassion comes first.
Partnerships are unavoidable in today’s business climate because they provide brands with a more extensive audience base and market opportunities. It is a sharing of brand expertise that each has accumulated over time for the benefit of the other, as well as an exploration of new opportunities that the new partnership may lead to.
Exploring the possibilities that members of the same or distinct industries have to offer will help small businesses reach greater realms. To read more about these topics, subscribe to CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. For the latest updates, visit our Twitter page at @canadian_sme.
