6 Essentials For A Successful Brand Partnership

Some brand partnerships land so perfectly we’re still talking about them years later, like Yeezy and Adidas. Others don’t even make it off the start line, or when they do, they land somewhere short of complete failure. Remember Forever21 sending Atkins bars to a teenage audience? 

See, partnerships are about more than the idea, the perfectly matched product set, or the clever seasonal offer. Taking the time to holistically evaluate whether the brand partnership will work is a widely underrated part of a brand partnership strategy.

So, what makes a truly successful brand partnership? Well, you need to find a match on these six essentials before you begin to build a brand partnership:

1. Find Your Shared Values

Customers are more open to partnerships when they understand how the brands are connected. Mismatched values might come across as disingenuous or your brand stepping away from your mission. Do some soul searching and find a shared passion across multiple values such as the environment, craftsmanship, or a lifestyle choice.

2. Use The Right Channels 

If you sell on social media D2C, and your partner brand sells through department stores, their customers might not be open to shopping D2C, and vice versa. Your partnership will be most successful when new customers are already using the channels you’re set to be available through.

3. Choose Complementary Products

Similar to using the right channels, target customers also need to be open to buying your product. A successful partnership would include a shoe brand partnering with a sock brand as their customers have a clear need for both products. Meanwhile, an ethical shoe brand partnering with a fast-food brand won’t make sense to most customers.

4. Find An Agreed Time Frame

A partnership bonds two brands together, not forever, but for as long as twitter will remember it – which is a while. Your brand and the partner need to agree to a time frame for the actual partnership and post partnership. After the final deadline, the partner brand can’t accuse any positive or negative activity of impacting the other brand.

5. Create Boundaries & Trust

Beginning a partnership is similar to a relationship. You can rely on each other for support and quality movie snacks. But crying in the rain on their doorstep when they don’t respond for 45 minutes moves into the territory of codependency. Successful brand partnerships need boundaries. Set rules to allow your brand to work efficiently and trust the other side to do so.

6. Try To Match Your Attitude To Resources 

Budgets are fickle things. A funded start-up on the brand awareness train might throw spend in every direction. At the same time, a family-run passion project needs to be more conservative with their spending. Your successful brand partnership needs a coordinated budget split between awareness and conversions, as well as the relevant KPIs. You also need to be in sync with investments into creative development and any restrictions for the campaign.

3 types of successful brand to brand partnerships

Brand to brand partnerships isn’t all collaborative Instagram giveaways and newsletter exclusives. They are everywhere in our world:

Food products in supermarkets

The OG partnership: Supplier and distributor. Whether it’s ASOS or Tescos, whichever store chooses to stock your product or service is a partner. These partnerships are most successful than the product fits the shop. Think eco cereals and low waste supermarkets. They have similar values, consumers like the shopping channel, the products align, and time frames and trust are well and truly handled.

Hello Fresh vouchers in Metro newspapers

Busy commuters are Hello Fresh’s target customers. Featuring Hello Fresh flyers in Metro’s newspapers hits the perfect time-conscious professional audience in a situation where they have time to read and engage.

Tyviso digital network

Tyviso’s digital network creates brand partnerships in a similar way – but enhanced by digital. 

• Tyviso would be the newspaper in this situation, appearing at the perfect time after someone has completed a purchase and is in prime shopping mode. 

• The featured brands are the flyers. But instead of everyone seeing Every. Single. Flyer. An algorithm serves only the most relevant offers and deals. And every brand shown on the network is also shown to the other brands’ customers in one giant relevancy driven cycle. 

Our network works so well because relevance and timeliness are two key things to prioritise in and look for in a successful brand partnership. Interested in joining the Tyviso network? It’s free to set up, and we only take a small commission from each sale, making it 0 risk and all reward.