eLab’s Knowledge Repository

eLab – Collaborative marketing.ppt 

Traditional mass marketing techniques seem to be declining in effectiveness and increasing in costs. Indeed this 2006 survey shows that 78% of American advertisers feel that traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years. 80%  of them will spend more of their advertising budget on Web advertising and 68% of advertisers will look to search engine marketing. Advertisers are also looking at alternatives to traditional TV advertising and will spend more on: branded entertainment within TV programs (61%); TV program sponsorships (55%); interactive advertising during TV programs (48%); online video ads (45%); and product placement (44%). Furthermore, traditional promotions have decreasing ROI: according to a Nielsen survey, between 1987 and 1997, trade promotion spending increased from 35% of the marketing mix to 54%, yet consumer sales remained relatively stable. One of the ideas to improve marketing efficiency is collective pooling of marketing efforts, information and intelligence in order to bring combined products/services to a greater audience at more economical costs. Collaborative marketing is generally based on commonality (geography, timeframe, audience, theme, etc.) and can be of many forms, for example:

• Lake Geneva and Matterhorn region marketing campaigns organized by the tourist offices of Geneva, Lake Geneva Region (Vaud) and Matterhorn Region (Valais)
• various partners advertising during a music festival or cultural event
• retailers and manufacturers targeting key shopper groups
• consumers become co-creator of a product (see entry on co-creation)

All marketing elements are potentially integrated around a common theme that communicates a brand value for the retailer and the strategic manufacturers:

• product development: for P&G Advisors, customers try new products and provide feedback
• pricing: in HP partition pricing, customers pay incrementally for capacity as they need rather that paying upfront for hardware
• segmentation: Dell allows customers to configure, price and order products according to their needs
• support: Cisco rewards selected network engineers that answer support questions on their online community by certifying them.

For detailed examples, see this article.

Most collaborative marketing initiatives rely on technological platform to connect the partners involved: customers, design/sales/marketing departments, suppliers, etc.

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