Case Study: GoPro X Red Bull Stratos
When we picture examples of partnerships, particularly in promotions, we often imagine brand partnerships, brand collaborations, and partner marketing. Brands working with other brands, making a joint product, or running a promotion together. Although this is a significant and impactful part of partnerships, the scope of what it can be is much wider than we may initially think.
For this article, ‘partnerships’ have been divided into three major categories: brands, suppliers, and agencies to help you better understand the partners involved in a promotion and the value of nurturing these relationships and connections.
Partnering with another brand in a campaign or product is a great way to leverage your existing customers and gain even more engagement and eyes on your business.
Picking a brand partner should be a decision that empowers and improves your brand offering, whether in your shopper activation or general product offerings. Otherwise, partnerships will provide very little value to your brand.
The factors in choosing a suitable brand partner may seem obvious, but they are critical considerations in the partnership process.
Ideally, it’s best to collaborate with businesses that are both like-minded and non-competing so that both partners can benefit and flourish. The most advantageous brand partnerships are when the brands are aligned in values, but are usually not in each other’s product category or industry.
Brands that represent a similar ideal or have similar branding will make the best partners.
In the case of co-branding in particular, brands that are similarly-minded but not competing provide the best chance to reach a like-minded but broader market of audiences. The most effective way to use this partnership is to show the consumers that you can’t have one offer without the other.
It’s also vital that partners are on the same page about their goals, outcomes, and expectations. Like any collaborative process, communicating and maintaining expectations, as well as checking in with each other throughout the promotional process, is the lifeblood of a successful partnership. This applies to all kinds of partnerships, not just between brands. It’s also an essential part of collaborative relationships with agencies and suppliers who are an integral part of running your promotions.
A partnership is a great opportunity to share knowledge and data on customer behaviours and data. It’s also a brilliant chance to enrich both brands and elevate your organisational process and promotional activities including shopper activations.
Each partner brings their unique values and skillset, creating the opportunity for a larger outreach, connecting with more people, and better activations.
Having joint forces also enables a way for brands to provide extra value through content. With various experts, the partnership opens an opportunity to create some organic buzz through content marketing and ‘edutaining’ your audience.
Ideally, the collaborating brands should enhance each other’s offerings and provide a new meaning and purpose for the buyers. Even better if your partnership allows an opportunity to deliver an end-to-end solution or product, it can help lower the customer’s buying hesitancy as the promotional or product offering becomes much more powerful together.
Using Happy Eggs as a case study, we’ll review how several years ago, their promotion was successful from a partnership standpoint and how PromoNow’s partnership module, PartnerNow was able to help.
Happy Eggs was able to find hundreds of outdoor activity centres to partner with them for their promotion, “Outdoors For All”.
They were able to:
Brands can do the same using a toolkit like PartnerNow to help manage partners, enabling your brands to check in on partner applicants, work, and communicate - all in one place, with pre-vetted and onboarded partners to choose from.
PartnerNow was used to support this promotion and is available as a module for the PromoNow platform which also contains all the necessary tools needed to build a successful and engaging digital promotional campaign.
The value of establishing a partnership varies case-by-case, however, according to the Harvard Business Review, “94% of tech industry executives consider innovation partnerships a necessary strategy.” Let’s, for example, look at the partnership between Red Bull and GoPro.
One example of a hugely successful brand partnership is the Red Bull & GoPro ‘Stratos’ campaign In 2012. This campaign saw Felix Baumgartner break 3 world records with a 4-minute-long freefall jump, 24 miles above the Earth.
At the time, there were 8 million live viewers on YouTube and on N-TV, 6.59 million viewers when the jump landed.
Red Bull and GoPro, whose brand identities are associated with brave and extreme athletic ventures, were the brands closely tied to the event. They were able to contribute a record-breaking moment that went beyond a marketing campaign, but also a massive pop-culture moment that’s deeply connected with their brands.
There’s a lot to consider when you run a promotion: prizes, terms & conditions, marketing, designs, and microsites - just to name a few.
Often, it’s not feasible to plan everything within one team. Businesses will find specialist suppliers to handle certain aspects, such as printing or prizes. The issue here is the time and fees involved in finding these specialists.
If a brand decides to work with an agency to help them build a promotion, oftentimes they will be the ones to look for these suppliers. Yet even then, it can take some time to get prizes and printing sorted which can be incredibly frustrating and nerve-wracking when deadlines are immovable and steadily creeping up. By using platforms such as PromoNow, brands can pick the reliable suppliers they want, within moments. With reputable suppliers, like Golden Moments and Prize Professionals who can curate bespoke prizes for promotions.
All suppliers and partners are on-boarded and vetted for trustworthiness and reliability. With PromoNow’s SmartPartner system, you’ll be presented with suppliers that are best suited for your brand and promotions. It takes all the hassle out of the searching process and shows you the most suited and relevant choices.
Partnerships with suppliers span across almost every promotion you will hold. These suppliers will always be an instrumental building block to a successful promotion. It’s worthwhile to build a strong relationship with these partners who can produce packaging and prize offerings for your brands if you intend to continue offering promotions as part of your brand’s shopper activations strategy.
Agencies are the ones within your partnership that will be primarily running promotions from the development of the digital designs to delivering the promotion to entrants.
The issue with this is that agencies won’t always be a consistent or permanent fixture in your brand’s shopper activation strategy. Promotional agencies all have their specialities and have varying abilities to deliver certain types of promotional mechanics.
Creative agencies will often come and go for brands, but making that transition between agencies can be the most difficult part.
To prevent the loss of data on knowledge within this transitional period, having a centralised platform that can help you ‘induct’ or welcome other teams and agencies into a hub of your company’s resources, past promotions, and relevant data will greatly help agencies that work with you get an idea of what the KPIs the promotion they’ll be working on will need to meet and the standards of promotions for your brand.
Instead of your vital information about your promotions moving with the agencies, it would be held in a stationary and secure platform. This way, agencies can work for your brand to produce promotions on the platform, and then, if and when the brand switches agencies, vital information, communications, and records are all kept on the platform. Making it much easier for the new agencies to pick up where the last agency left off.
Continuing a professional relationship with your partners is a deeply beneficial decision. With a past of mutual trust and benefit, providing a successful partnership experience will always open a gateway to building a long-term mutually beneficial relationship.
By ensuring your partners have everything they need within your reasonable ability to provide, you can contribute to building a long-standing partnership that will continue to benefit one another: not only making it easier to run another promotion or campaign with them but also cutting down on all the time and resources in finding a new partner.
Using a previous example of Red Bull and Go Pro, we can see how they’ve built a long-lasting partnership even after the Stratos Campaign. Four years after the Stratos campaign, the brand announced they’d be joining forces on a multi-year global partnership. Red Bull would be given equity in GoPro and GoPro would get access to 1,800 Red Bull events across over 100 countries. Whether the Stratos campaign was the catalyst or not, what ultimately cemented their partnership would be what led up to the successful campaign, followed by the mutually beneficial results.
Although the most obvious one would be monetary benefits, from increased sales revenue to more profit as a whole, this aspect is just a bonus to all the other benefits a partnership can provide.
For businesses that have a relatively small market share, but make up for that by being fast-growing and well-established: getting a partnership may imply a larger market share and better sales performance.
Smaller businesses are also able to build up more visibility in the industry through partnering with another brand.
It’s also an endeavour that’s relatively cost-effective. Helping save on external third parties and, can be a great source of new ideas and skills.
By combining the resources and skills that the brands have, it provides a new, unique customer value. Businesses can provide better services but also potentially help the industry develop and target new customers in previously unexplored segments.
Between the partners, there needs to be constant and clear communication. There needs to be a deep understanding of each partner’s responsibilities and what’s agreed upon.
That being said, building and managing these relationships can be difficult. According to Mark Sochan, in ‘The Art of Strategic Partnering’, 60-65% of partnerships fail due to issues such as unrealistic expectations, failure to agree on objectives, and a lack of communication.
Since a partnership involves another party, you won’t be able to completely control what’s happening, meaning you have to surrender control over your collaborator’s actions and understand things won’t happen the way you may intend them to.
It’s also crucial for your contract to detail all requirements in the case of an undesirable outcome or obstacle.
Having an unclear partnership is bound to lead to conflicts and disagreements, the partnership may even fall through.
With all that being said, strong communication channels and a way to facilitate collaboration partnerships can lead to incredibly successful and fulfilling campaigns and promotions. Not just for the brands involved, but also for the consumers.
To find out how your brand can build partnerships and create successful campaigns with an end-to-end platform. Speak to one of our experts at no cost. Consider using the PromoNow platform. Speak with a platform consultant at +44 (0)20 380 555 38 or email [email protected] to learn more.
PromoNow is a managed end-to-end cloud platform empowering brand owners with rapid, scalable and secure solutions for any promotional activation.
