Fashion

Creating Brand Partners Is the Way to Reach on Top in Today’s Competitive Market

In today’s business world, it is very hard to survive the initial years in the business pool, let alone reaching the top. Many businesses are adopting new and innovative marketing strategies that have never been tried before and they may back fire. With several businesses out there, each with a unique range of products and services, having diverse characteristics and features, different advertising and promotional strategies, making a decision of collaborating up with them is a critical one. A company with an unpopular reputation might prove bad for your business and your brand image.

Many businesses are now turning towards co-branding to flourish and reach new heights in today’s competitive environment. What is co-branding? The concept might be unclear to many, but the urge for entrepreneurs to improvise their strategies and increase profits has led to finding new ways to increase sales. Co-branding brings two or more brands together forming a single product or service. By doing this, a strong brand rises above, gaining advantage from other single brands in the market. The perception of obtaining dual satisfaction from a single product or service excites a customer.

Different companies have varying goals to fulfill from a co-branding alliance. Standard motives include:

*Expansion of customer base
*Obtain operational benefits
*Gain financial benefits
*Strengthen its position in the market
*Reacting to expressed and suppressed needs of customers
*Building a new customer seeming value

Hotels, social clubs and other organizations are boosting up their sales by adopting the co-branding strategy. It all starts with an alliance with another powerful and popular brand that are used or owned by celebrities. In this way, hotels publicize their image as a top-notch host of star personalities and as cliché as it is, people run towards popular things. Social and sports clubs advertise themselves with a Hollywood or other influential personality to boom their memberships. Co-branding is not just limited to the service industry but widely extends to manufacturing industries as well. A classic example would be the alliance of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Nike, which raked in massive donations through the popular Live Strong baller band.

Recently a popular jewelry brand co-branded with a famous hotel’s service of master suites. The strategy involved offering the master suite guests to view and wear the jewelry if they opt for the service and could ultimately purchase the product. This co-branding was a smart move to capture market through other means. You naturally develop a liking for something, if it is constantly around you. Other co-branding examples would be MasterCard – Virgin partnership, Kmart – Martha Stewart Everyday line and the very famous RED (Global Fund) – Various (Apple, Dell, Nike, GAP, Starbucks & others).

With co-branding, several advantages exist. Some of these are:

*Increased Revenues
*Access To Several Finance Resources
*Improvement In Product Image & Credibility
*Amplified Exposure From Shared Advertising

For more information on co-branding, and which particular business or marketing strategy might suit your business, refer to Scaling retail, our website: www.scalingretail.com.