How cooperative marketing works, its benefits, and applicability.
Cooperative marketing takes place when two or more companies work together to reach the same goals of advertising and promoting a product or service. What is meant by this is that many times companies will agree to work in partnership to market a product or service so that both companies will benefit from advertising and promoting the product or service. With that being said, companies can benefit from marketing their products or services together by creating a stronger marketing campaign and expand their standpoint for reaching their targeted audience. Usually this type of marketing is appropriate for manufacturers who are supporting the efforts of a retailer in advertising and promoting a product or service. However, many times numerous companies will band together and utilize this type of marketing to defray the costs associated with advertising and promoting a product or service (West, 2008).
What is the value such relationships?
These types of relationships can be of great significance to Global Gadget Imports (GGI) when attempting to promote our new product line of house wares. If we join forces with other companies in marketing the new house ware product line the costs of advertisements will be split between us and the partnering companies. For example, if we were to join together with another store to create an advertisement of the house ware product line we are trying to promote and a product line they are trying to promote then we would split the advertisement cost which in return saves us and the partnering store money. Also, if we were to partner with another store and order merchandise in larger bulks a bigger discount would be given. For example, ordering ten lamps would be more expensive than ordering one-hundred lamps from our distributor. In this sense, shipment of the lamps would cost less if more were shipped at the same time than less being shipped at the same time (West, 2008).
Besides advertising, what are other creative ways companies can engage in cooperative marketing?
There are several innovative methods that companies can take part in to market their products or services jointly with other companies besides advertisement. This type of marketing method can involve something as simple as sharing the mailing list of consumers with other companies. It can also involve sharing television airtime with a well-matched retailer, or linking with a website, such as Facebook, to advertise and promote a company’s products or services. In addition, one trendy means for partnering together in marketing a company’s products or services is to connect with a charitable organization as a sponsor (Kotler & Keller, 2009).
How should a company decide with whom to partner in joint marketing efforts?
When deciding which party to join with in cooperative marketing it is significant to find a partner that is fit appropriately for the marketing goals wanting to be achieved by both companies. What is meant by this is that when two companies come together and utilize cooperative marketing their ideas in regards to promotion and advertisement of selling their products or services to consumers must be somewhat alike. For example, an insurance company might be a good fit to cooperatively market with a financial planner. One other thought is that since companies will be working together to market their products or services these companies will be seen as one entity, therefore, when deciding upon a party to join with it is important to find one that is well respected by consumers (West 2008). With that being said, GGI must choose a joint partner that is both respected and compatible with the company in order to effectively use cooperative marketing to advertise and promote our products.
What are some of the effective cooperative marketing ways that GGI could use in this project?
GGI could use cooperative marketing to effectively advertise and promote the new product line of house wares. The company could partner with other companies that have the same goals or similar objects in advertising or promoting their products. For instance, we could develop a cooperative marketing arrangement with a neighboring grocery store, such as Kroger. How this would work is for all house ware sale that Kroger makes for a given period of time we could offer them a percentage of the sales. We could also share advertisement space in a neighboring paper, such as the newspaper or their weekly advertisements of their products on sale. Also, GGI could use cooperative marketing by permitting another company to place an advertisement on our website, and in exchange we could be permitted to place an advertisement on their website (West 2008). With that being said, it is my opinion that we could benefit from these types of partnerships or other types of partnership that the marketing team can put into practice.
References
Kotler, P., & Keller, K. (2009). Management Marketing, (13th ed.). Pearson-Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ.
West, T. (2008). Cooperative marketing: What it does? Is it for you? Retrieved from http://ohioline.osu.edu/cd-fact/pdf/Cooperative_marketing.pdf