WHAT IS MARKETING PARTNERSHIP?

According to Kunitzky, a marketing partnership is a collaboration between two or more organizations to establish a mid-term or long-term marketing program to achieve each of their respective marketing objectives. A partnership marketing program is needed when one organization can achieve its goals better by leveraging another organization's complementary strengths to pursue a similar customer base (Kunitzky, 2011). Justin Belleme defines a marketing partnership as an attempt to access the network or any existing audiences of the partner. 

This partnership shall increase exposure by borrowing connections and audience trust from the partner company or brand (Belleme, 2017). Based on these definitions, marketing partnerships can be utilized to get marketing business objectives easier by collaborating with one or many organizations. Cooperation must be beneficial to all organizations that team in the partnership. There must not be a one-sided benefit. In that case, a company must provide something to attract others to collaborate.

A mutual agreement and objectives must be settled before making any partnership. Before partnering with other organizations or parties, a company must create a written and legal understanding to clarify the objectives and goals. It can be satisfying for all companies involved in the partnership. Therefore, when a company breaks the deal, that company can be sued by law. This can also be applied to marketing partnerships between organizations. 

According to upcounsel.com, some essential areas can be included in the agreement, such as the promotion topic, the marketing project timeline, each partner's objective, and many more. A marketing partnership agreement can be beneficial in reducing advertising costs. The marketing and advertising cost for events and promotions is shared, thereby making lesser costs than without having a partnership (Marketing Partnership Agreement: What You Need to Know, 2020). Judging by the definition and the benefits of having a marketing partnership, establishing connections with many companies with similar objectives is a wise decision. 

Marketing partnership is necessary, especially when a company needs to cover things that it lacks, such as having little to no connections to promote products, services, or the company itself. Of course, a company must conduct something to attract other organizations or companies to collaborate. Cooperation between two or more organizations must reach the respective business goals, not a one-sided benefit. In other words, there should be a benefit for all companies collaborating in a business, not just benefiting one company while the others gain nothing.

For example, when we have a restaurant and invite a famous brand to sell their things in our restaurant, we have to seek mutual benefit. Our restaurant shall promote its brand, such as placing ads about the brand at our restaurant. Of course, this shall benefit our partner that sells the brand, while our partnership shall trigger consumers to come and eat at our restaurant because of the promotion containing the famous and well-known brand. This condition allows the restaurant to utilize the marketing condition where the restaurant is the place to promote the renowned brand to reach more consumers. On the other hand, the restaurant can get many visitors, increasing the chance for people to eat at the restaurant. So this is one of the collaboration examples that benefit both parties.

Another example, we may have a partnership with an affiliate. Partnerships with a companion can promote special offers from merchants who have associations with them. Affiliates do not need to hold stock or fulfil orders since this is managed by the associated merchant partners (Armour, 2016). In this case, we collaborate with publishers, and they shall promote our products to the publisher's audience. Some forms of this promotion are using websites that can reach many people. Since online can be more effective, publishing our product online using an affiliate is an intelligent decision. Marketing partners are still important, even though we can promote our company without partners. The partnership means we can reach more consumers or create a better consumer-based product instead of promoting our products. The reason is our partner might have better audiences, thus increasing the chance for us to have more consumers. Therefore, either allowing our brand to be promoted by affiliate marketing or bundling our products with any organization as our partner by having a distribution partnership can be helpful to seek more audience, allowing them to be consumers.

Judging by the benefit we can gain from a partnership, we should not hesitate to collaborate with any trusted and good marketing partners, especially when we can't promote our products, services, and brands independently. So why do we need marketing partners? Based on the benefit mentioned above, the answer is simple. A partnership can benefit our company. The benefits are increasing brand awareness, customer acquisition, product distribution, and program funding (Maarif, 2021).

When it comes to brand awareness, having a partnership is utterly essential because this can be a chance to increase and make many people remember our brand. For example, we can use a loyalty partnership. This partnership is not about working with another company but with consumers. They can be our marketing assets to promote our brand. One of the implementations is giving our loyal consumers a lower price if they can advertise our products or services to 2 or more people, for example. We can also give them coupons, vouchers, and bonuses if they can promote our brand.

Another similar example having partnerships with affiliates or e-commerce companies such as Tokopedia, Bukalapak, Shopee, and many more. They can give discounts, coupons, and vouchers that can be used to buy specific products or brands at a lower price. This is beneficial to companies that sell their brands or products at an e-commerce company because they can help any registered companies promote their brands or products. This effectively increases brand awareness, allowing more people to recognize the promoted brands and products.

Companies can also use famous influencers to endorse their brands, products, or services. This is one of the effective methods to attract consumers. People tend to easily trust products or services influencers promote, and their social media accounts have many followers. Increasing chances to have customer acquisition can be guaranteed by having a partnership with influencers. Partnership with influencers is a way to reach mutual benefits. For example, when we promote our brands by cooperating with influencers, not only can this attract consumers to buy our products or brands, this partnership surely can increase the influencer's fame. We do pay them to promote our products or services. This already benefits the influencers. However, there is another benefit that influencers can obtain.

For instance, if our products and brands are harmful, proven illegal, or even dangerous, and many more, this will surely decrease their reputation. However, if our products endorsed by influencers are proven good, functional, and safe, this may increase their fame. So this is smart to collaborate with influencers as our marketing partners. As long as we can convince them that our products or services are suitable and trusted, they will not hesitate to collaborate in a marketing partnership to promote our brands. Also, we have to be able to pay them when we establish a partnership with them. Having partnerships with influencers can lead to opening new markets. Since influencers can reach consumers in many places of living. They can make many people recognize our brands, products, or services. This partnership increases brand awareness, but after obtaining many consumers from various regions, this might trigger a demand to open new markets in another area.

Indeed, online transactions can be done to buy our products. However, expanding our market by opening our company in other regions will help people buy our product without paying the postal fee. We must analyze whether the areas we need to expand have many consumers. The partnership is an effective way to open new markets because this can increase promotion, and increasing promotion may lead to expansion. Opening another market can also mean targeting the audience to reach more market segmentation. For example, advertising from influencers or affiliates gives rise to adults buying our products initially targeted only at youngsters, thus generating demand for adults. In this case, we already open another market segmentation. This condition may lead us to produce products that can be more suitable for adults, not just for youngsters.

Another form of partnership is cooperating with delivery services such as Gojek, Grab, etc. Our company can collaborate with these services to increase brand awareness, customer acquisitions, product distribution, also program funding. A company that sells its products to a delivery service may acquire the benefits of having a more manageable distribution of its products. For example, a company listed in the delivery service may not distribute its product independently. The delivery service will pick up the product and send it to the consumer's location. In this case, we do not need to worry whether we don't have accommodation to distribute our product. Nowadays, delivery services help small and big companies deliver their products to consumers without considering independent distribution.

Program funding can be achieved by having partnerships with delivery services. For instance, Gojek usually discounts specific items sold by a company associated with Gojek. A company that cooperates with Gojek shall decrease the price of their products or services, gaining more consumers to buy them. Another similar case is a delivery service or e-commerce service might pay half or more of the price to their partners that sell their brands, thereby creating discounts that can be affordable for consumers without letting the partners that use their service reduce their cost.

For example, books sold by a store that cooperates with Tokopedia are discounted. The store or company does not decrease their price, but Tokopedia pays the cut to allow consumers to buy the books at a lower price. This shall benefit the store because they can gather more funds from the program made by Tokopedia. On the other hand, Tokopedia may attract more consumers to search for and buy products using Tokopedia and convince companies to collaborate with Tokopedia, increasing funds for Tokopedia. 

Establishing a connection with many partners is a wise decision. This shall lead to cooperation with partners to promote our products or services. There are a lot of advantages that we gain by having partnerships with other organizations. A company must admit its weaknesses, especially regarding marketing. Therefore, being open to partnership may cover our inability to promote our products, brands, or services. There must be either marketing or business literacy for everyone wanting to run their business. Institutions or any business school should provide classes to people to understand business, especially the importance of marketing partnerships. A class affordable to everyone to increase business and communication literacy can add more competent entrepreneurs or business people.

A marketing partnership must guarantee satisfaction for both parties. For example, a company that sells its product to an e-commerce or delivery service must earn a suitable income without being cut with excessive deduction fees that the company should afford. On the other hand, delivery services and e-commerce organizations must discern abuse conducted by their partners. For example, a delivery service known as Gojek could be abused by creating clone accounts to get many vouchers. This might not affect the partners associated with Gojek, but this could inflict a financial loss on this company. However, it might not be so much to affect an already big unicorn company like Gojek. Therefore, a marketing partnership is beneficial and a sagacious decision. However, an established marketing partnership must be ensured to benefit both parties.

Consumers and marketers need to look at false marketing advertisements used to deceive people. Nowadays, many fraudulent businesses attract consumers, leading consumers to trust these wrong businesses instead of the right ones. One of the characteristics is they use advertisement as a pretence to run their business, and there is no segmentation regarding the ads they show. For example, in an advertisement showcasing perfume for women, no profiling exists to determine which segments should receive the ads. This false marketing leads consumers to invest their money, deceived into thinking they shall gain cash by watching ads from various partners, which are other companies that place their ads. Many fraud companies use peculiar marketing patterns that marketers and keen people discern clearly. However, only some understand how to identify false business with unclear and fatuous strategic marketing without segmenting the market. Therefore, business literacy must educate people to avoid fraud, especially in marketing.

A company with the right marketing strategy must be able to dominate the market. Losing consumers to those scammers is unpleasant since they deceive others to get income while the right one uses the correct procedure and does not get as much as those scammers. Making innovations to attract customers, such as modifying the advertisement to be more attractive, can be a viable option. If marketers elucidate the proper marketing procedure by doing the right step, this may educate people to realize that they are deceived. There is no way for a company or organization to use an unpleasant marketing strategy to promote their product, such as placing advertisements to a company that does not understand market segments or consumer profiling. The right company or organization shall not make such a partnership happen. In reality, these fraudulent will slowly deteriorate and be gone. However, if a company with the right marketing strategy does not innovate, those scammers shall lead to customer acquisition. This scheme makes a company loses some consumers to those scammers, albeit this is totally unlikely to happen.

Another issue a company and its marketers should consider is being aware of name acquisition. For example, a fraudulent business takes a company's name and claims that it has a marketing partnership to promote its product on the platform created by this scammer. Marketers must respond by announcing that their company does not have a marketing partnership with that scammer. Name acquisition made by these scammers shall hinder the already implemented strategic marketing from gaining consumers or may lead to the fall of reputation. In short, there is no real marketing partnership without the involvement of market segmentation. This issue is based on reality. False advertisement businesses with false strategic marketing fooled many people with low business literacy. Many companies announced they have no marketing partnership or place advertisements on those scammers' platforms. Thus, marketing partnership is essential for any company that wants to keep up with changes and continuously innovate. They need to choose partnerships wisely and be careful of fraud and people who claim to be affiliated or in cooperation with them. This can destroy the already established reputation.

REFERENCES:

Armour, A. (2016). Power of Marketing Connections: Pathway for Strategic Marketing. Reading: Henley Business School.

Belleme, J. (2017). Effective Marketing Partnerships. JB Media Group, LLC.

Kunitzky, R. (2011). Partnership Marketing: How to Grow Your Business and Transform Your Brand Through Smart Collaboration. Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada.

Maarif, N. N. (2021). Marketing Communications Partners and Industry: Strategic Marketing Communication. Jakarta: Communication & Business Institute.

Marketing Partnership Agreement: What You Need to Know. (2020, November 5). Retrieved from upcounsel.com: https://www.upcounsel.com/marketing-partnership-agreement