A great way to extend your brand and grow your business is to engage in relevant alliances or joint ventures. You may be questioning if this is really a marketing issue. Take our word for it, it is. Marketing can help direct and guide you in defining positive brand alliances as well as destructive ones.

To pick an appropriate brand (through a joint venture) one must understand what your brand means in the scope of the marketplace, understand what the brand of the potential joint venture is and find out where the businesses can be synergistic. Sounds simple but it is not.

There is more to joint ventures than just money, there’s corporate culture, product/service synergy, brand reputation.

The questions you need to ask are critical and may or may not impact the your company:

• Will your brand image suffer or be strengthened through this joint venture?
• Are your customers already buying from the potential suitor?
• What is their experience?
• Does one company have more to gain than the other?
• Can you test the concept?

Clear answers to these questions will help you extend your brand and create more longterm equity as well as increasing the size and scope of your business. If all is in order, creating a joint venture or alliance can strengthen your brand in the marketplace, open new markets, create a deeper service level, a wider product offering, better distribution, improve efficiency,

Questions? Comments? We’d love to hear from you.