Don’t consider a brand partnership unless it’s a win for all involved
I always say don’t build a partnership unless it’s a win for your client, the customer, the brand partner and the all-important bottom line. Only if it’s a win for all those involved will you create brand partnerships that last. Of the many things that brands get wrong when considering brand partnerships this is the most fundamental. Too often brands look at it too simply: choosing partners because they think they are like them, assuming that that will make them the right fit, only considering how the partnership benefits them and not what it brings to everyone at the table.
Do understand what your customer really wants
You must begin by understanding what your customer really wants and then think how a brand partnership could unlock this. What do your customers dream about? What are the worries that keep them awake at night? Getting under your customers’ skin, understanding what really matters to them and why, is absolutely critical to achieving success. By identifying what really matters to people, you can create an emotional connection that is meaningful. This is the key to success in today’s tough marketing environment and defining the emotional connection should be the central focus of developing every marketing strategy.
Don’t just make an emotional connection at Christmas
The Christmas advertising campaigns over the last two years by superbrands such as John Lewis, M&S, Sainsbury’s and Lidl have put creating an emotional connection over a functional one very much to the fore. But they mostly just do it at Christmas. Why? The best brands build deep emotional relationships with their customers that last 12 months of the year, not just for the Christmas period.
Do identify the moment when a relationship can be started and stand out with something big
Armed with the knowledge of their customers’ emotional touchpoints a brand must then behave as one would in building any friendship, by identifying the moments when a relationship can be started, grown, built upon, and then behaving accordingly. To build and maintain this relationship successfully brand partnerships are the perfect tool because they enable brands to focus on the bigger picture, what really matters to their customers, and bring together the right brands to achieve that objective. You need to create a single, big stand-out idea; one that’s simple and compelling and which adds value to the brand, brand partners, and consumers, and own that idea.
Don’t just partner one brand with another
Brand partnerships are far more than just partnering one brand with another. You must find and build the right partnerships around your big stand-out idea. Crucially, they must be partnerships with the right chemistry. Chosen right, brand partners can give you credibility, access to customers, get you into places that you couldn’t otherwise get, and unlock access to experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to provide. The right brand partnerships help generate the power of people coming together to produce better things than a brand could on their own.
Do consider building a series of partnerships
Rather than saying your brand alliance just lives or dies behind one partnership or a single big deal, it pays to be clever when creating a strategy and build a series of influential partnerships behind it. In this way you create true partnerships, enduring customers and communication strategy, as well as an idea and territory that you own and which is far more defensible.
Putting the dos and don’ts into practice with Aviva Advantages
To create brand loyalty for Aviva, a brand operating in a fiercely competitive insurance industry where customers traditionally hear little from their provider and aggregators encourage disloyalty and price over service, Cherry London helped launch Aviva Advantages a digitally-enabled, in-life and loyalty partnership programme.
To engage beyond welcome and renewal, help customers feel recognised and rewarded for choosing and staying with Aviva, keep them longer, as well as make them more valuable, we accrued a broad range of commercial partners to develop a range of rewards and content aimed at benefitting customers.
With Aviva Advantages we focus on 4 areas – at home, on the road, health and well-being, travel and leisure. For example, a large proportion of Aviva customers have car insurance, so one of the partners we work with is APH Airport Parking to offer large discounts. We also understand that customers want to spend quality time with their family and friends, not least at Christmas, so we provided the opportunity to win holidays at the Ice Hotel, tickets to the Christmas Carol Singalong at the Royal Albert Hall, or gifts from brand partner, toucanBox. This year we are giving away 10 decorated Christmas trees from Homebase and tickets to the Carole King Hit Musical Beautiful.
The great results demonstrate the power of brand partnerships done correctly. Since creating Aviva Advantages, sales, retention rate and data capture on engaged customers have all increased exponentially. We have exceeded our targets in delivering customer contacts, increasing email open rate and decreasing unsubcribes. There has been a fourfold increase in Aviva customers aware of Advantages buying another policy compared to those unaware, and customers aware of Advantages hold twice as many Aviva products as those unaware.
In considering all the above it leads me to close with one more topical ‘don’t’:
Don’t dress up market standard offers and a monetised platform as customer loyalty…
It didn’t work for Barclays Bespoke (which closed last month after only 2 years in operation) and it won’t work for you!
