Joint Marketing Campaigns

It's been cool to see some big new coalition campaigns launch in recent weeks. Everyone knows that campaigning in partnership is absolutely golden when it works. At the same time, most people who've worked on them have their own war stories of when it doesn’t.   Getting everyone aligned for launch is an achievement - but the dream is getting that prolonged buy-in, where partner orgs get behind it like it's their own. When I've worked on campaigns that achieved that, here's what we got right.   1. Choose your partners carefully Don't bring people in just because they're a name, or because you feel like you should. Everyone who is formally part of your campaign should be brought in for a reason. They should have a clear part to play, an agreed level of engagement and senior buy-in.   2. Build it together A sure fire way to get disengagement is to present a fully-formed campaign and a 'please promote this to your audiences' ask. Bring your partners in early to workshop messaging and tactics. Pick up the phone for counsel when you're making big decisions. Make sure they feel invested in where you end up.   3. Play to everyone's strengths - and don't overstretch people Not all your partners will have the resources, specialisms or desire to play a role in everything you do. If one of your partners is ace on public affairs but doesn't really do social media, give them a core role planning your party conference presence and let them duck out of supporter comms meetings.   4. Make it easy to get involved - but don't be too prescriptive. Some of your partners will want content on a plate, so cater for that. But others really won't. I remember when I'd ask my YoungMinds social media team to promote coalition campaigns, they'd despair if they had to post the branded launch graphic that they knew wouldn't work with our audience. If they were allowed to get creative with the message - and were given the time to do so - it worked better all round.   5. Communicate little and often. A quick, basic weekly or fortnightly note to your partners to keep them in the loop, rather than a long, formally crafted 'newsletter' style update, will help them to feel like part of the team rather than an 'audience'. Little check-ins work a treat too. "I'm trying to figure out how to frame the press release - can I pick your brains?" Treat your partners like colleagues, not stakeholders. What else?

📣 Breaking the silos = unlocking serious growth in FMCG retail. We’ve been testing and measuring integrated marketing campaigns across different touchpoints — from digital media to in-store activations. The results are clear: 📈 Integrated campaigns drive 157% higher ROI compared to single-channel efforts. But here’s the real kicker: 🛒 When digital ads are aligned with in-store promotions, basket size increases by 34%. That’s not a small lift. That’s category growth. So what’s really happening? Consumers don’t think in channels — they don’t care if your brand message comes from a shelf, a screen, or a sample. They respond to consistency, timing, and relevance. Here’s what our top-performing cross-channel campaigns had in common: ✅ Clear product positioning across both physical and digital assets ✅ Time-bound, in-store rewards that matched online promotions ✅ Dynamic creative on digital based on real-time stock and store locations ✅ Retail media placements that complemented in-store visibility (not duplicated it) This is where many FMCG brands are still missing the mark: Marketing runs digital. Trade runs in-store. Sales tries to connect both… usually too late. 💡 Integration isn’t about working more. It’s about working together earlier. When media buyers, brand managers, and sales teams co-create one unified plan — built around the same campaign objective — you unlock efficiency and effectiveness. 🧠 So here’s a question worth asking on your next campaign review: Are we pushing a message — or orchestrating a journey? And if your in-store mechanics aren’t supporting your online media spend (or vice versa), then part of your budget is leaking. 🔄 What you can start doing now: Bring your trade, brand, and media planning calendars into the same war room — earlier. Use store-level data to tailor digital creative and target based on supply reality. Push retailers to enable closed-loop measurement where possible — it’s worth it. Measure campaign success beyond impressions or sell-out. Look at cross-channel impact on basket size, units per transaction, and repeat purchase. We’re in an era where execution beats strategy — but only if your execution is connected. Would love to hear: What’s been your biggest unlock (or challenge) with cross-channel retail campaigns? Let’s learn from each other — we all win when shoppers win. #RetailMarketing #FMCG #CPG #IntegratedMarketing #OmnichannelRetail #DataDrivenMarketing #TradeMarketing #RetailExecution #ShopperMarketing #CustomerJourney #RetailMedia #InstoreMarketing #MarketingAnalytics #RetailGrowth #MarketingEffectiveness #CrossChannelStrategy #ConsumerBehavior

**Maximizing B2B Marketing Success: The Power of Including Channel Partners in Your Strategy** In today’s competitive B2B landscape, a robust marketing strategy is essential. However, one critical element often overlooked is the inclusion of channel partners. Integrating these partners into your marketing plan can significantly amplify your reach, enhance brand credibility, and drive sales growth. Here’s why and how you should include channel partners in your B2B marketing strategy: **1. Amplified Reach and Visibility** Channel partners have established networks and customer bases that you can leverage. By collaborating with them, you can extend your brand’s reach far beyond your direct efforts. Co-branded marketing initiatives, joint webinars, and shared content can introduce your products or services to new, highly relevant audiences. **2. Enhanced Credibility and Trust** Trust is a cornerstone of B2B relationships. Channel partners often have long-standing relationships with their clients, who trust their recommendations. **3. Optimized Resource Utilization** Channel partners can provide additional resources for your marketing efforts. They can contribute to content creation, share insights on customer preferences, and participate in events or campaigns. This not only saves time and costs but also enriches your marketing initiatives with diverse perspectives and expertise. **4. Improved Customer Engagement** Channel partners often have deep insights into their customers’ needs and pain points. Collaborating with them allows you to tailor your marketing messages more effectively, ensuring they resonate with the target audience. **5. Increased Sales and Revenue** Ultimately, the goal of any marketing strategy is to drive sales and revenue. Channel partners can play a pivotal role in this by actively promoting your products or services. Their involvement can accelerate the sales cycle and open up new opportunities, leading to increased revenue growth. **How to Effectively Include Channel Partners in Your Marketing Strategy:** - **Develop a Collaborative Plan:** Work closely with your channel partners to create a joint marketing plan. Align your goals, define roles, and set clear expectations to ensure everyone is on the same page. - **Leverage Joint Marketing Initiatives:** Engage in co-marketing activities such as webinars, whitepapers, and case studies. These initiatives can showcase the combined expertise of both parties and provide valuable content to your audience. - **Provide Marketing Support:** Equip your channel partners with the necessary tools and resources. Offer training, marketing collateral, and access to your marketing platforms to enable them to effectively promote your products. - **Measure and Optimize:** Track the performance of your joint marketing efforts. Analyze the results, gather feedback, and make data-driven adjustments to continuously improve the effectiveness of your strategy.

Nice. Meituan has figured out how to charge for the same ad twice Meituan is China’s local commerce super-app - food delivery, retail, services, travel - serving ~770M annual users and millions of merchants. Its scale puts it ahead of Western rivals in many aspects, and there's a lot to learn from them. For the past year or two, every food delivery marketplace has been talking about the importance of its ad business (here is my earlier post about it https://lnkd.in/dqt7x3Ri). Well, Meituan seems to be taking ads to another level - figuring out how to charge two businesses for the same ad slot and still keep both happy. The challenge How do the ads in the marketplaces work? A customer opens an app and see a promoted slot. This slot can be a product and in that case, two parties want it promoted: - the brand itself that wants its product to be sold, - the store that sells the product and wants people to buy more in its shop. In traditional setups, only one of those businesses gets to pay for the ad, the other loses out. That meant advertisers wasted opportunities and - probably most importantly - Meituan itself left money on the table. Even worse, the value wasn’t clear: sometimes the brand paid but the store captured sales for free, sometimes the other way around. The solution Recently, Meituan rolled out what it calls Joint Marketing - letting a brand and a store co-fund the exact same ad. A bit like Facebook’s Collaborative Ads, but deeper: instead of just sharing data, Meituan rewired its ad system so one slot can fairly split both the cost and the benefit. Even more so, they reengineered their billing so that each party pays for different things: brands pay for views (impressions - and this is what they traditionally prefer), while stores prefer to pay for results (clicks - also the advertiser's preference). Meituan built the system so both models can run in the same ad unit. That way each side pays in the way that makes sense for them - but the ad still appears as one. And the marketplace creates money out of thin air. The results The outcome: ads that are jointly funded perform better. Meituan reports more than 20% higher revenue per ad impression and higher ROI compared to regular ads. At their scale, it is huge. So, more money for Meituan, more efficient spending for stores and brands. Source: Meituan's Tech Blog And here is what DoorDash has recently done in the ADs domain https://lnkd.in/dbkhZgYa

Revolut x Audi F1 already has a head start on its partnership marketing. To mark the launch of joint accounts: a new feature designed to simplify money management for any 2 people. The campaign will offer customers the chance to win tickets to the Suzuka F1 Grand Prix, including VIP passes, autographed merchandise, and official merchandise. It’s a smaller scale than The HEINEKEN Company x Full Time Formula season ticket holder activation, but the logic is the same: attach the activation to something fans already want. What makes this one worth paying attention to is the sequencing. Revolut started with a product moment - a joint account and used the partnership as a distribution channel for it, and made Audi F1 the vehicle to deliver the message. That's a fundamentally different brief than most sponsor activations run off. It shows in the output because the campaign feels coherent, there's a product, a reason to act, and a reward that's genuinely relevant to the audience receiving it. Most activations get one of those three right. For rights holders, there's a direct implication here. You can’t always wait for sponsors to arrive with the activation ideas. The sponsors with creative energy and available budget are usually the ones with something happening on their product roadmap — a feature launch, a market expansion, a rebrand. If you know what's coming before they've briefed their agency, you can walk in with a concept already framed around their business problem. That changes the conversation from media placement to commercial partnership. One question worth asking every sponsor before the next race window: What product moments do you have in the next 60 days? For brand managers, the lesson is about sequencing. Start with what you need customers to do, along with what you have rights to. Revolut needed people to try joint accounts, and the Audi Revolut F1 Team gave them a reason to pay attention. Mind you, it’s always a bit easier for a B2C company to build these types of activations, but it still requires work to get it right.

“’Til I Died” is one of the most interesting campaigns I came across while reviewing the best communication projects of 2024, as listed by “Creative Review”.   The British Heart Foundation and Saatchi & Saatchi teamed up to raise awareness about the fact that anyone – at any age – can experience heart disease. Solution? A series of murals in 12 locations across the UK, corresponding to hometowns of young heart disease victims. Murals were timed to coincide with the UEFA European Football Championship, cleverly justifying use of this form, which can be associated both with the world of sports and the act of commemorating someone.   There is a lot to like about this campaign: 🎯 it is highly localised, to the extent it presents a former member of a given community; 🖌️ murals are very well crafted; ⏱️ timing is thought-through; 💬 it creates buzz, even if murals are offline.   Results: the campaign reached 595 million people and generated 300 pieces of media coverage. Also, the Foundation raised more than 700,000 GBP in donations.   #advertising #marketing #outdoor #OOH. Photos: Saatchi & Saatchi

A smart play in cross-marketing, consumer psychology, and memory-making is what I witnessed when we recently stepped into a Mothercare India store with a simple agenda: to buy a few bath accessories and shampoos for our toddlers. 👶 But what caught my eye wasn’t on the shelves. It was right at the checkout counter. There was this majestic Brother sewing and embroidery machine. I had never seen anything like that in such stores before, so I curiously asked the salesmen what it was doing there. Their answer surprised me. The scheme was that if a customer purchased minimum 3 pieces of clothing (or baby essentials like bibs, napkins, swaddles, burp cloths etc.), they could get their child’s name embroidered on two of those items free of cost. Buyers would even get to choose the embroidery font and the thread color. Suddenly, although we had no plans to buy clothes that day, we ended up doing just that. And that’s the brilliance of it. 🍼 For Mothercare: It was a nudge that increases the customer's basket size and strengthens emotional connection with their brand. 🖨️ For Brother: It was a chance to showcase a product line many parents may not even know exists. (Like me, I knew them only for printers, and not for embroidery machines! 🪡 ) So, this is a classic case of two brands that don't compete but complement each other. In marketing terms, we'd call this a smart co-branding move where one brand gains sales (Mothercare) and the other gains visibility (Brother). Plus, both tap into the emotions of parents eager to personalize and preserve memories. In marketing, we often say that consumers don’t just buy products, but rather they look for meaning, emotion, and identity. This strategy blended utility, novelty, and sentiments beautifully. Of course, there are many such examples in the world today, but this was something that I experienced recently. And, it left me convinced that perhaps the best awareness campaigns aren’t loud billboards or WhatsApp reminders, but quiet experiences right at the point of purchase. 🛍️ 🛒 #consumerpsychology #marketingstrategy #behavioralscience #retail #crossbranding

FMCG Sales & Marketing Execution Alignment Checklist In FMCG, winning in the market is not just about having a great brand or wide distribution rather it’s about flawless execution. Sales Execution ensures that products are always available, visible and sold in the right channels while marketing execution builds brand desire and consumer pull through well planned campaigns and activations. However, true success comes when Sales and Marketing are not working in silos but in tight alignment, moving together with a shared goal that leads to driving sustainable sales growth and building consumer loyalty. Here is listed down checklist serves as a practical guide to help Sales and Marketing teams: 1️⃣ Strategy Alignment ✅ Sales & Marketing share the same business objectives (volume, value, market share). ✅ Joint understanding of consumer segments and shopper insights. ✅ Marketing calendar and Sales push calendar are fully aligned. ✅ Clear roles and responsibilities defined (who leads what part of execution). 2️⃣ Joint Planning ✅ Marketing shares campaign plans with Sales at least 4-6 weeks ahead. ✅ Sales shares retailer calendars and trade promotion plans with Marketing. ✅ Joint plan for key launches and seasonal activations (pre , during , post campaign). ✅ Unified KPI dashboard covering both sales and marketing metrics. 3️⃣ Execution Readiness ✅ All necessary sales materials (POS, shelf talkers, displays) ready before campaign. ✅ All distributor partners briefed and stock secured. ✅ Sales teams trained on campaign mechanics and messaging. ✅ Marketing ensures ATL/BTL campaigns are actionable in retail environments. 4️⃣ In market Execution ✅ Field sales team executing Perfect Store principles aligned with marketing. ✅ Real time tracking of on shelf availability, share of shelf, promotion compliance, display compliance & consumer engagement (activation events). ✅ Feedback loop from sales field teams to marketing team (fast cycle). 5️⃣ Post Execution Review ✅ Joint Sales + Marketing campaign debrief conducted. ✅ Analysis of sell in and sell out vs. targets, execution compliance,shopper response and sales uplift & lessons learned. ✅ Insights shared to inform future campaigns. ✅ Recognition and rewards for execution excellence across both teams. 6️⃣ Continuous Improvement ✅ Monthly Sales + Marketing sync meetings on execution health. ✅ Ongoing training for Sales on marketing activation excellence. ✅ Regular shopper behavior updates shared with Sales. ✅ Marketing team visits trade/retail channels monthly to stay connected to reality. Key Point: 👉 Key mindset: One Team, One Execution; not Sales vs. Marketing, but Sales + Marketing vs. Market. 👉 Execution excellence comes from tight alignment + fast feedback + constant learning. This checklist and fostering a culture of joint execution, FMCG businesses close the gap between strategy and in market reality and win both at the shelf & in the hearts of consumers.

You think partnerships just add reach. Yet the best partnerships multiply reach exponentially. Because the smartest brands partner to create ecosystems, not just deals. Steps to build partnerships that multiply reach: Step 1: Identify partners with overlapping audiences but noncompeting offers. HubSpot and Canva’s co-marketing drove 40% joint lead growth. Step 2: Create joint value propositions, not just co-branded logos. Shopify and TikTok built a creator-commerce integration, spiking merchant sales by 30%. Step 3: Co-create exclusive offers or content. Slack and Google’s shared toolkits lifted signups by 22%. Step 4: Promote across both partner channels. Zapier and Trello’s dual email push doubled product adoption in one month. Step 5: Track shared metrics and optimize together. Adobe and Microsoft aligned on usage KPIs, expanding joint deals by 35%. The best partnerships aren’t transactions. They’re growth engines.

We came across some of the most unexpected brand collabs in 2024 👇🏻 Fenty Beauty x Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Charlotte Tilbury Beauty x Formula One racing But one thing here was, how brands are not shy anymore to co-market with other brands. Instead, rising engagement rates show how partnerships have become a powerful way to expand reach, tap into new audiences, and create unique value for your customers. So if you are a young brand, looking for a guide on co-marketing with brands, you can follow these steps 👇🏻 1. Identify Potential Partners Look for brands that share your target audience but don't directly compete with you. Consider brands whose products or services complement yours. Research brands that align with your values and brand image. 2. Evaluate Partnership Potential Assess the brand's audience size and engagement levels. Review their marketing channels, content quality and consider any other potential risks. 3. Reach Out and Pitch Craft a personalized outreach message highlighting mutual benefits. Articulate your value proposition and potential collaboration ideas. 4. Define Partnership Goals and Metrics You should have clear set, measurable objectives for the partnership. Agree on KPIs to track success (e.g., leads generated, sales, audience growth). And establish a timeline for the partnership and key milestones. 5. Develop a solid co-marketing strategy Brainstorm creative campaign ideas that leverage both brands' strengths. Consider various co-marketing tactics- Joint content creation (e.g., webinars, ebooks, blog posts), Co-sponsored events, cross-promotional social media campaigns or co-branded product offerings. 6. A Legal Partnership Agreement Outline roles, responsibilities, and resource commitments, define how leads or revenues will be shared and agree on approval processes for co-created content. Address legal considerations (e.g., intellectual property, confidentiality). 7. Execute the Marketing Campaign Develop a detailed project plan with clear deadlines and ensure consistent messaging across both brands. Make sure you track all agreed-upon KPIs and analyze the performance of different campaign elements. Consider long-term strategic alliances if the partnership proves fruitful. #day12 #100daysoflearning #comarketing #brandmarketing #marketingideas #brands #fentybeauty #KPIs #contentmarketing #productmarketing #comarketingstrategy #partnerbrands