How Building Authentic Brand Partnerships Can Benefit Your UK Business

When Nike and Apple joined forces to deliver the FuelBand, Nike enjoyed an 18% profit boost. When BMW and Louis Vuitton partnered to create luggage designed to perfectly complement BMW vehicles, both brands saw an increase of hundreds of thousands in website visitors. These brand partnerships were hugely influential, captivating their shared audiences and increasing the presence and success of each brand involved.

But brand partnerships aren’t reserved for industry leaders and luxury brands. Brand partnerships are an effective strategy businesses of all sizes can use to meet their goals, allowing them to grow and thrive in competitive landscapes. They create a host of opportunities and potential benefits, ranging from an expanded audience reach to enhanced credibility and trust.

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

If you’re exploring brand partnerships for your business, here are some powerful ways they may benefit you, particularly when they’re formed authentically and aligned with your brand and target audience’s values.

Expanded Audience Reach

When brands collaborate, they connect with each other’s audiences by combining marketing efforts across social media, email, paid advertising, and their respective websites. This expands both businesses’ reach, allowing them to reach new people, enter new markets, and grow brand awareness.

Brand partnerships can also become newsworthy and attention-grabbing, expanding each brand’s reach beyond their audiences by garnering attention from news outlets, social media, and across industries (particularly in the case of cross-industry collaborations). We often see this with celebrity and brand partnerships, like when K-pop’s BTS partnered with McDonald’s, gaining global attention. But we’ll also see this with unexpected brand pairings like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Crocs, or Heinz and Absolut Vodka. The unexpected pairings sensationalise brand partnerships, adding to their success and becoming a strategy for a successful mashup.

Enhanced Brand Credibility and Trust

It’s not just a newsworthy collaboration that leads to the success of brand partnerships. A crucial aspect is that when brands reach one another’s audiences through collaborations, credibility and trust are already established. Audiences are already open and receptive to messages from the brands they follow. When a trusted brand collaborates, its partner gains credibility—even among audiences unfamiliar with it.

Trust and credibility are crucial for brands. They lead to brand loyalty, positive brand perceptions, and increased profits. These qualities and effects help create long-term success.

Shared Resources

The shared resources expand beyond exposure to one another’s audiences. It also encompasses resources such as budgets, talent, data, marketing materials, and products. This allows brands to be more cost-effective and efficient in a partnership. It also reduces the risk of taking on new business ventures because the risk is spread across two or more parties. By distributing risks, partnerships lessen potential losses. Of course, this reduced risk varies greatly depending on the type of partnership and the brands’ positioning.

Innovation and Growth

When brands come together, their shared resources and abilities can spur innovation and growth for each company. This might involve creating a unique product, like in the case of Apple and Nike, or it could involve developing unique ways to connect and engage with their audiences. Bringing together the different perspectives of each brand can foster unique marketing strategies.

How to Maximise the Impact of Brand Partnerships

The best partnerships mutually benefit each brand and its audience, and achieving this requires authentic and aligned partnerships. Not all brands can come together and succeed; it requires a diligent process, and even after the collaboration is formed, the work doesn’t stop. Here are the key elements of an effective partnership.

Choosing the Right Partner(s)

When choosing brands to partner with for your business, you’ll want to look for shared values and an overlapping audience. This sets you both up for a more impactful collaboration that you’ll both benefit from. The UK’s top-paying casinos understand this importance when choosing the game developers they partner with. They ensure developers uphold the same player protection policies they do. Choosing a developer who neglects policy updates can undermine their site’s credibility. This is important in a range of applications, and not just regulated industries like online gambling. Brands from beauty to food seek common ground between themselves and their brand partner because customer trust is important in every industry.

Beyond preserving the trust you’ve established with your audience, it’s also important to ensure your brand collaboration delivers value to each partner’s audience. When values are shared, this is a key indicator that your two brands will resonate with each other’s audiences.

Creating Mutually Beneficial Agreements

Before you start working with another brand, you want to shape an agreement that benefits both of you. In developing your agreements, you’ll want clearly established guidelines for how the data collected or the new products or innovations developed can be used by each brand. You’ll also want to set clear objectives and timelines, ensuring each party knows its responsibilities.

Monitoring Partnership Performance

Once you’ve established your agreement and set to work on your brand partnership, you’ll want to monitor how the partnership is performing. In doing this, you can make adjustments as needed to maximise the partnership’s impact for both brands and their audiences.

Maintaining Open Communication

Because you’ll be working across different organisations, each with individual goals and operational models, you’ll want to maintain open communication throughout the partnership. This involves having regular check-ins to see how shared projects are progressing and communicating any pertinent information.

Making the Most of Brand Partnerships

Brand partnerships are powerful tools for marketing efforts that benefit the brands working together and each brand’s audience. If you’re considering implementing this strategy for your brand, be sure to carefully vet potential partners and evaluate the value and opportunities you bring to the table—after all, a partnership is about mutual success and not just about what your business needs.