MODERN AGE MANTRA : CO-OPERATE TO DOMINATE

Many marketing pundits have opined that the future of marketing rests in brand alliances: where alliances are forged only to maximise consumer preference and where both companies and/or brands see mutual benefits: where the threat is not competitive but instead from the consumer. In India, however, it has had a chequered history and the basic reason for that is our general distrust about anything that we believe will help both parties. But the paradigm of this alliance-building is changing for the better: it is helping companies maximise resources and is enabling them to build value across the consumer spectrum. I have always believed that varying companies have varying strengths. Like 3M is great at innovation, Sony is great at taking products to market. Today, the Koreans are teaching invaluable lessons in price optimisation, as are brands like Apple, which are exploding the domains of imagination. But somewhere down the line, all these companies understand the import and the purpose of doing this. It is not for survival alone that they strike alliances: it is also because they intrinsically believe that sometimes one plus one really is 11!

There are revenue alliances, which focus on the immediate and may have no long-term impact: such as the one that Star TV has created for KBC 2 between themselves and Airtel. This alliance is not only designed to be revenue-driven but Star will layer a lot of programming innovation: it will help people reach out and call the show in order to participate: it will throw up interesting data which will then have an impact on the understanding of the reach and power of television and such like.

But at the heart of it, what is this alliance? Nothing, except for strategic co-optetiton, something that global brands understood long ago, which is why in Europe you have a long-standing alliance between Nestle and Coca-Cola. I remember many years ago, there was an interesting alliance here between Bata and the then Reckit & Colman when Bata stores used to market Cherry Blossom: now, that made sense since Bata was effectively making the shoe-shopping experience convenient, given the fact that one did not have to hunt in another store for shoe polish.

If you look at the impending explosion of the retail scenario in India and what it will do to real estate pricing, co-optetiton will become a business imperative rather than just well-researched management intervention. It is this step that will help define which brands will compete for consumers and at all times, attempting to maximise the experience that consumers get. The importance of this management concept cannot be ignored by companies, big or small: be they ones operating within the domestic market or, for that matter, internationally. The time for this concept to be the strategic bedrock of many corporate moves has come. The sooner we embrace it, the better off we shall all be.