By Kevin Dunn, VP of Retail and CPG Sales, LiveRamp
Co-branding has been a cornerstone of the advertising and marketing industry for decades, and for good reason. It allows companies to expand their customer base, drive loyalty, fuel business growth, and reduce costs. From iconic partnerships, such as Taco Bell and Doritos teaming up for new menu items, or creative collaborations like Hasbro and Mattel launching branded games in time with Transformers and Barbie movie releases, co-branding has proven to be a powerful marketing strategy.
In today’s dynamic landscape, where third-party cookies are phasing out and consumer journeys are becoming increasingly complex, partnerships within the ecosystem are more crucial than ever. The widespread availability of data and the advent of sophisticated data collaboration tools have ushered in a new era of co-branding.
With the right playbook, brands can now share and leverage data more easily to create more impactful partnerships that transform customer experiences while delivering greater business value.
Combine and Activate Audience Sets to Drive Better Customer Experiences
Co-branding partners have always shared data to create cohesive customer experiences, such as what the industry has seen between airlines and credit card companies. New technologies are making this process easier and more privacy-conscious, but the true potential lies in the ability to activate, measure, and optimize customer experiences in more sophisticated ways.
To start, ensure that your and your partners’ first-party loyalty data is structured in a way that allows for a deep understanding of your customers. This can be achieved by adopting a consistent identity framework across the enterprise to connect data from sales, customer service, marketing, product, and other parts of the organization that otherwise can be siloed. This expanded customer view is essential for safely translating and connecting data across every touchpoint in the customer journey.
By doing so, marketing data science teams can access, analyze, and measure data to uncover insights that enable real-time personalization and powerful customer experiences across all channels where consumers spend their time.
Collaborate in New Ways to Enrich Your Data
With a solid first-party data foundation in place, co-branding partners can further enhance their customer intelligence by tapping into data sources beyond loyalty records. Collaborate with activation partners, such as demand-side platforms, to overlap third-party audiences and enrich your data with intent, transaction, or lifestyle signals. This enrichment leads to more personalized experiences that drive conversions.
This approach becomes particularly powerful when brands collaborate with channel partners, such as CTV platforms. Take the upcoming Summer Olympics, for example. Instead of merely identifying which consumers will watch the Olympics, co-branding partners can collaborate with an airline to pinpoint which consumers will travel to the Paris games.
Beyond specific moments in time, the ability for first-party data to be collaborated between companies in a secure and privacy-focused ways produces more granular insights and data sets that make it easier than ever to uncover insights that draw customers back into the brand partnership experience.
Unlock Richer Customer Insights with Non-Endemic Data
By adopting advanced technologies to accelerate your co-branding partnership, brands can scale their partnership efforts from one-to-one to one-to-many. For instance, credit card companies possess vast amounts of transaction data, but its utility is often limited by financial industry regulations. By extending partnerships to include other partners who offer closed-loop measurement on transaction data, such as a retailer or grocery chain, brands can uncover new depths of customer intelligence.
This evolution from endemic to non-endemic partnerships enables the discovery of entirely new insights about consumers, enriching the “golden record” and providing everyone in the partnership with closed-loop results. For example, combining credit card transaction data with data from travel partners could reveal new spending patterns and customer behaviors that were previously inaccessible.
What Successful Co-Branding Looks Like
The next era of co-branding will take advantage of the ability to collaborate safely and secure with data to tie together multiple verticals, provide deeper customer insights, discover new audiences, and inspire those audiences to take action. Moreover, leveraging data collaboration technology will increase the speed-to-value of marketing efforts. By moving faster, brands can test and learn what works for their unique goals without committing to long-term partnerships until they can measure and understand the value.
Companies that successfully capitalize on this opportunity will deliver more personalized customer experiences, enhance their reach and scale, understand the effectiveness of their campaigns, and forge new and innovative partnerships.
