Feature: Partnership marketing: Marriages of convenience

Partnerships are the essence of a happy life, and marketing is no different. Marriages, co-habiting, employee-employer, friends, even the clothes you wear, the book you read, the music you like are all about a partnership with something else to enhance your life. Life is full of successful partnerships. The marriage of two brands working together to forge a successful partnership is no different in marketing terms than human terms.

Partnerships make you happier! They can make your marketing more effective. They double your marketing benefits, give you great positive endorsement, give you free benefits and give offers to your customers while doing the same for a partner’s customers. Partnership marketing is increasingly important in an unstable market where marketing decision-makers are worried about how effective their marketing is and where to spend an ever-reducing marketing resource.

Partnerships are measurable, unlike most advertising, and you can see what works and what doesn’t very quickly. They enable anyone to justify a marketing spend. They offer a marketer the ability to gain free media worth 10 times what is paid for the partnership itself. The media also tend to be editorial and brand endorsed, featured in “money can’t buy” positions such as on websites that don’t sell advertising or on emails that don’t sell advertising or in retail outlets that don’t sell point of sale.

Brands will gain targeted media and targeted customers as you can align them with synergistic brands that literally match your brand values to partners. Most partnerships are a meeting of minds. Specialist agencies claim they are “dating agencies for brands” because a partnership is just like a human relationship of any kind, built on trust, allowing you into the other person’s inner sanctum and being endorsed by them.

To demonstrate the range and depth of partnerships here are four current examples. They are all very different and unusual but all very effective at creating that quid pro quo and intertwine brands to produce an outcome that each individual brand could not achieve on their own. Everyone benefits – the sum of the parts is greater than the two individual brands alone.

HP and Dame Edna

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has unveiled a new website in conjunction with Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage) as part of its global “What Do You Have to Say” campaign. HP first announced the partnership in December.

Consumers are invited to create personalised works of art, interacting with an existing picture created by Humphries and one by his alter ego, Dame Edna. Users can download and print the artwork after selecting a border, mounting, framing and signing the piece.

“What Do You Have to Say” has the aim of promoting consumer engagement and interaction with the HP brand by giving them the tools to explore themselves online.

My View: This is a wonderfully imaginative partnership using a personality’s brand to emotionalise and add colour to an otherwise functional product, while Dame Edna engages with her audience in a modern way fitting with her brand proposition and enhancing her art credentials.

E4 and MySpace

E4 launched the new series of teen drama Skins on its website and on MySpace.com before it broadcast the show on television. Web users could watch the first episode of the second series on MySpace in four separate segments. MySpace.com and E4.com are also showing Unseen Skins, a series of short online specials that run in conjunction with the main series.

My View: This is an excellent lifestyle partnership targeting E4 and MySpace customers. MySpace gains unique content and rewards its users while E4 communicates the programme to opinion-formers in a “cool” environment while increasing viewing and tapping into how this younger audience are now watching TV – on computers.

Apple iTunes and U2

A study by BrandAmp shows brands how tapping into the growing influence of music can be an effective way to promote brands. In one case study, it looked at the return on investment for Apple, which achieved a 22 per cent increase in positive feelings towards the brand and a 16 per cent increase in “purchase consideration” on the back of its iTunes partnership with U2.

The study is the result of over six months’ research involving psychologists, creative agencies and broadcasters, as well as members of the public. The concluding pages advocate using music partnerships as an end, not just an adjunct to traditional marketing activity.

My View: This shows the untapped power of music as a partnership option. Brands can tap into an emotion unmatched by anything else that has ongoing positive benefits – unlike films, books or TV. Music lasts forever and you can carry it everywhere with you. The positive mutually beneficial brand association is unreachable by other brands that offer services that don’t make life more enjoyable.

Pepsi and Matt Damon

PepsiCo has teamed up with Bourne Ultimatum star Matt Damon as part of an initiative to bring clean water to communities in Africa, China, India and Brazil. As part of the deal, the US soft drinks giant will invest management expertise and £4.1 million in cash into two long-term water projects.

The Earth Institute will receive the lion’s share of the funding, while Damon’s H20 Africa charity will receive $2.5 million from PepsiCo’s corporate budget.

It is hoped the involvement of the Hollywood star will help spread the message about the urgency of clean supplies to the estimated 1.1 billion people currently without access to safe drinking water. Damon set up the charity to provide wells on farms and sanitation in countries. He said: “Pepsi is dwarfing all our efforts in the last two years [but] it’s not just a cheque. I’hoping this is a beacon everyone else succumbs to by irresistible example.”

My View: This is a very powerful and very urgently needed partnership where both brands (Matt Damon and Pepsi) are using their influence, standing and money to make a real difference through partnerships that will ensure that other brands will follow. The outcome will bring cleaner water to communities – really worthwhile partnership marketing.