Joint promotion: Two brands come together to move forward

How do I find new potential customers? It might be the question most frequently asked to marketers. The pond companies have been fishing from for years is ‘good enough’ but you won’t find that extra growth there. So where do you find it? You can advertise for a lot of money or exhibit at a new trade show, but how do you reach new customers with a limited budget? Joint promotion might just be the right answer. For Volkswagen Campers, we recently laid the foundation for a successful joint promotion campaign. Using this example, we explain what joint promotion entails, how to set up such a campaign, and why it’s important for brands to ‘fall in love’ with each other.

The objective was simple: to bring the ‘VW Camper’ lifestyle to the attention of more people. We have a strong bond with our target audience, our fans, and have been inspiring these people for years. But how can we expose more people to how wonderful it is to go on vacation with a VW camper? It was time to preach outside ‘our own parish’. We quickly realized that we didn’t want to buy very high reach through expensive campaigns but wanted to do this ‘smarter’ and ‘more fun’. So we set ourselves the goal to generate the right attention with a limited budget.

Joint promotion: Generating lots of attention with a limited budget

After an inventory of best practices and a brainstorm, we had a pile of ideas but also realized that we might not be the only brand facing this challenge! Are there companies we can collaborate with? The idea of joint promotion was born. But which brands fit well with VW? We searched for brands that shared our values, whose target audience fits or aligns with ours, and an organization that is ‘free’ enough to collaborate on something truly different. In short, a brand we could fall in love with ourselves. We found it.

Falling in love

At the top of our list was Grape District, a young and fresh Dutch wine company that does things a little differently. We tossed an idea out and soon we were sitting at the table thinking about possible campaigns. In this meeting, we established that both brands love creating fun content for their audience and that campers, camping, and wine are closely connected for many people. It was therefore a logical step to literally bring this together; the idea for the wine road trip was born. But with which campaign do we best bring this to attention?

Choosing the right campaign

We decided to link it to something tangible: with the purchase of a bottle of wine, customers received a card they could fill in to enter the contest. This way, we got participants who truly loved wine and made the result immediately tangible. The winner will take this wonderful trip with three friends. During the trip, they will be followed by a cameraman and we will report through photos and stories on various social media channels. The start of the campaign, the prize, the winner, the ‘live’ report of the road trip, and the final video were all fun contact and content moments that led to high engagement. A great success!

Using joint promotion as a marketing tool

Joint promotion enables companies to leverage each other’s strengths to grow together but is ‘far from the bed’ for many brands. Especially in a time when people ‘like’ or are fans of brands, it is very possible to create very natural connections. In this example, we actually connect a camper to a bottle of wine, but the connecting factor is not the product but the target audience! Camping and wine are so closely related that these two brands can be too.

You can ask yourself the same question: which other brands or products does my target audience use that actually fit very well with mine? Apple and Nike helped people run better together and Lego let children play with the real Star Wars characters. We can’t imagine there are no ‘logical’ partners for your brand to collaborate with. What such a collaboration would look like comes later; first think about which brand you could fall in love with. Do you see opportunities for a joint promotion with your brand or have you done something before? Let us know!

A good story sells itself. Merkelijkheid writes that story and then helps you realize the tools to make that story known in the market. Joint promotion is of course just one of the tools we use for our clients. Interested in what we can do for you? We’d love to hear from you!