A quick primer on marketing partnerships: what are the options? How do you implement them? How do you evaluate them?

1. Marketing Partnerships

2. LECTURE OUTLINE
• What is a partnership?
• Why partnerships?
• Types of partnerships
• Good partnerships, bad partnerships
• Implementing partnerships
• Measuring the impact of partnerships
• Partnership choices at different stages of the PLC

3. WHY PARTNERSHIPS?
• Greater reach and awareness
• Add credibility to messaging
• Gain broader distribution
• Improve ROI on marketing spend
• $$$ Synergies $$$

4. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS
• Brand: co-branding, joint product development
• Sponsorship: events, causes, research
• Channel: traditional channel, cross-selling, promotions
• Content: collateral, earned & paid media
• Platform: technology, hardware infrastructure,
software APIs, social media

5. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS:
BRAND
• Typically the most visible type of partnership
• Both brands benefit from increased awareness and cross-segment appeal
• May involve joint product development (especially common with food producers: this is
called an ingredient partnership)
• Celebrities are brands too!

6. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS:
SPONSORSHIP
Benefits of sponsorships:
• extensive reach
• improved customer sentiment
Types of sponsorships:
• events (sporting, media, and more)
• cause (e.g. non-profit)
• research (hackathons, grants,
commissioned studies)

7. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS:
CHANNEL
• Paid: pay up-front fee to gain access to distribution
• Revenue share: pay out % of sales to distribution partner
(affiliate marketing, reseller partners)
• Cross-selling: referral incentives, cross-promotional activities
• Free: often occurs based on a symbiotic relationship
between partners (i.e. sales increase when both products/
services are offered in tandem, or your product solves a pain
point for your distribution partner)

8. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS:
CONTENT
• Content partnerships can be
mutually beneficial to companies
• Party contributing the content
benefits from broader
audience, while recipient gets
quality content
• Vogue/Flipboard partnership
gaveVogue access to 100
million users vs.Vogue’s 3.3
million social media followers

9. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS:
PLATFORM
What is a platform?
• A platform is any underlying tech infrastructure that a third party
can build on for a different use case
• Social media platforms, software APIs, iOS or Android app stores
How do you take advantage of a platform?
• Building on a high-growth platform increases odds of capturing
some of that growth (e.g. Zynga – took advantage of growth in
Facebook platform to draw FB users to casual games)

10. SOMETIMES…ALL OFTHE
ABOVE
Amazon Web Services Partner
Programs include:
• Co-branding
• Channel sales agreements
• Content marketing
opportunities: downstream
collateral and upstream content
creation
• Platform growth and stickiness

11. IMPLEMENTING
PARTNERSHIPS
Key considerations when implementing partnerships:
• Set clear objectives and expectations (what is this expected to do for
your organization?)
• Clearly define your target customer and understand the audience/
customer base your partner is delivering (is it the right fit?)
• Define key metrics to be measured during and post-campaign
• Educate your partner (core brand values, sales collateral, etc.)
• Evaluate partnership value to each party and quantify where possible

13. GOOD PARTNERSHIP!
• Coherent partnership between
two well-known food brands
• Takes advantage of major
brand recognition of both
parties to encourage trial and
crossover between brands
• Resulted in over 1 million
blizzards sold – new limited
edition blizzard record for Dairy
Queen

14. BAD PARTNERSHIP!
• Unclear overlap or synergy
between Blackberry brand
image and Alicia Keys brand
image
• Lacked credibility –
especially once Alicia Keys
tweeted ‘sent from my
iPhone’

15. MEASURINGTHE IMPACT OF
PARTNERSHIPS
What’s your goal?
• Awareness
• Lead generation
• Change in customer sentiment
• Conversion rate
• More efficient marketing $ spend

16. IMPACT BY FUNNEL STAGE
Questions to ask:
• In which stage should we be
seeing the benefit of this
partnership?
• Is this the right type of partnership
for our marketing goals?
• Branding partnerships might
generate more awareness…
• …while channel partnerships may
generate more purchases

17. METRICS FOR MEASUREMENT
Moving from the top to bottom of the
funnel…
• Media views
• Brand awareness surveys
• Partnership awareness surveys
• Social media engagement
• Change in customer sentiment (favorability,
propensity to purchase, NPS)
• Inbound leads
• Sales to new customers (or trials)
• Sales to current customer (or repeat purchases)

18. WHERE DOES IT ALL FIT?
• Different types of
partnerships are more
feasible (and valuable) at
different stages of the
product life cycle
• Successful implementation
of partnership programs
depends on company size,
growth, and brand equity

19. PARTNERSHIPS ANDTHE PLC:
LAUNCH STAGE
• Developer APIs let you “partner” without a negotiated agreement and can
create distribution opportunities (e.g. Zynga)
• Do free work: creating content for a recognized brand expands reach at low
(cash) cost
• If your product/service is a non-core feature to a larger company’s product/
service, take advantage of channel opportunities
Source: GreylockVC

20. PARTNERSHIPS ANDTHE PLC:
GROWTH STAGE
• Partnership choices are dependent on a company’s segmentation and targeting choices
• Is the goal to broaden audience, or increase wallet share?
• Niche products may lend themselves well to hyper-local, focused event sponsorships…
• …while mass-market products and services may be better served by co-branding

21. PARTNERSHIPS ANDTHE PLC:
MATURE STAGE
• At maturity, goals begin to shift from market share growth to improvements in CLV
• Increasing loyalty/repeat purchase rate is crucial – pursue partnerships that improve customer
experience
• Alternately, partner to expand or improve product/service options available to your customer…
• …or to bring in new segments based on a content partner’s audience (Purina ad resulted in
57.8% brand lift!)

22. PARTNERSHIPS ANDTHE PLC:
DECLINING STAGE
• What can you do to monetize a declining business through partnerships?
• Pursue licensing deals to generate income from brand goodwill without
incremental marketing spend (harvesting strategy)
• Reallocate marketing $ to brand-building, growth-stage products

23. CONCLUSION
• Partnerships can be a cost-effective way to reach,
influence, and distribute to customers beyond your
own brand’s audience
• No partnerships for the sake of partnerships! Define
quantifiable goals and metrics to track during and
after campaigns.
• Determine what type of partnership is best for your
company’s stage of the PLC