Market your brand not alone, but together with your business partners
A significant part of marketing is done outside the company’s boundaries, together with business partners. Joint campaigns and co-op advertising funds run with dealers and distributors, joint launches with suppliers and
brand owners, cross-campaigns with companies producing complementary products, sponsorships, event partnerships with industry associations and trade fair organizers, agency and media collaborations;
each means a shared budget, a shared target, and a shared responsibility. Marketing partnership management is managing each of these partnerships as a defined program, in which who has committed to what, who contributes how much,
under which rules and for how long it will run, and how the result will be measured and shared between the parties are all defined.
When partnerships are not managed, the most common problem is the disconnect between contribution and return. Whether the advertising contribution given to a dealer was actually spent on that campaign is unknown; the budget the supplier promised
for the joint launch stays in an e-mail and is never collected; the visibility received in return for sponsorship is never measured. Different regional managers grant contributions to the same dealer under different terms; whose sales figure the return on the joint campaign
will be credited to is unclear. Because the contract, the invoice, the expense, and the result sit in separate places, whether the partnership was actually profitable cannot be said even at year end, and
the partnership remains a gesture rather than a business model.
In Minerva, marketing partnerships are defined as a program and contract structure attached to the business partner record. Every partnership includes its parties, type, duration, the parties’ contributions and obligations, rules such as contribution rate and
ceiling, the approval flow, and measurement criteria. Dealer co-op advertising funds are calculated with segment- and turnover-based rules, their use is tied to campaign and expense records, and settlement runs through the current account;
supplier and brand owner contributions are tracked as receivables and invoiced. Joint campaigns and events appear on the marketing calendar as the parties’ shared record, and the related documents, correspondence, and meeting
notes are attached to the same record. Because the contacts, quotations, and orders arising from the campaign are linked to the partnership record, the return on every partnership is reported by party; dealers and business partners see their own partnership
status, remaining funds, and results through the B2B portal. The next period’s partnership decisions rest on the previous period’s partnership-based return.
Do not leave your partnerships at the level of gestures and verbal promises; manage contribution, return, and outcome as defined programs, and know which partnership truly pays off.