Innovation through Collaboration

STREET SMART MARKETING

Innovation through Collaboration

Marketing collaboration creates opportunities to share resources and explode your profits.

By Lou Lasday

Marketing collaborations with clients, suppliers and sometimes even competitors is the hottest new paradigm in strategic corporate initiatives.

The American Marketing Association, in its recent management magazine contends, that "firms form collaborative alliances to share resources and combine knowledge, skills and other assets to better manage complex assignments and enhance overall profit".

Your own Gulf Coast enterprise should consider this approach in special situations where a more straightforward approach for client service will not suffice. It could revolve around a situation when you are certainly capable of handling the assignment, but a strategic alliance would create a "total solution" that is even better for the client and for you. It's a bringing together experts in each segment of the challenge. It's a little like saying, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".

With practice, your total performance on behalf of your client will be seamless. He'll receive your best thinking while project coordination will be under your control. The client will benefit from the "team" play because it will be your hand-picked players.

Collaboration on your part should also bring an expanded comfort level to all parties. It includes a willingness to be part of "something bigger and greater" if you are willing to join forces with high levels of intensity, coupled with an unspoken commitment to develop an ongoing relationship for the benefit of all concerned.

What it takes

Successful collaboration requires a willingness to engage in focused behavior such as sharing information, joint planning, face-to-face meetings, unity of purpose and mutual respect. While this may seem obvious to our Gulf Coast Entrepreneurs, many companies say they want to collaborate, but they don't devote the time, energy or resources.

Consider a community bank desirous of increasing its trust department business. Here, innovation through strategic collaboration could include sponsoring a series of breakfast seminars on the subject of estates and trusts. A senior bank personality would be the moderator.

Bank selected, local outside experts in fields of estate law, accounting and financial brokerage could present their experience and acknowledge how they coordinate with the bank trust officer. Top-tier bank customers, corporate executives and other high income residents would form the invited guest list. If positioned properly, this series would be a powerful, information-packed generator making the bank top-of-mind as the local epicenter for trust services in the community.

Think what this kind of exposure and collaboration could mean to the rotating service professionals chosen to participate. With the proper follow-through, relationships would be formed and creditability developed while referrals abound.

Enhance profits

If you agree that there is an opportunity here for your Gulf Coast enterprise, think from the client's viewpoint of what services or specialty segments involving you could be important to the client. Could a Realtor collaborate with a painter and a flooring contractor on an incentive basis for benefit while still offering time and price advantage to the client? Of course. Could a builder collaborate with a designer of high end pools? You bet.

So now, here comes the big question: What do you want to accomplish by supplementing your own infrastructure on a professional basis that will generate profit for all concerned? Answer the question to your own delight and you are well on your way to significantly improving your own near-team marketing performance and profit potential. You'll also be building valuable social capital for terrific future marketing collaborations.

In the words of Duke University basketball coaching legend, Mike Krzyzewski, "You develop a team to achieve what one person cannot accomplish alone. All of us alone are weaker, by far, than if all of us are together."

Lou Lasday, a corporate marketing advisor on Longboat Key, creates action-oriented strategic marketing initiatives for Gulf Coast emerging companies. He was a general partner of an Ad Age Top 100 marketing communications firm and can be reached at [email protected].