As a product manufacturer reaching your customers through a reseller network, you know it's critical to coordinate and leverage marketing activities with them. More than ever your marketing budgets are under scrutiny, while at the same time there's evergrowing pressure to achieve sales goals. This whitepaper outlines the key components of building an integrated co-op marketing program that achieves your key results.
Integrated Co-op MarketingFor national brands with Co-op marketing programsIntegrated Co-op MarketingTranslating National Strategies into Local Execution
Enabling Effective Co-op Marketing
As a product manufacturer reaching your customers through a reseller network, you know it's critical to coordinate and leverage marketing activities with them. More than ever your marketing budgets are under scrutiny, while at the same time there's ever-growing pressure to achieve sales goals.
One of your major expense line items is likely your reseller co-op marketing budget.
Ask yourself the following questions: . Are your resellers spending more time complaining about delayed reimbursements than working to . Do you really believe your co-op budget is being achieve results in your upcoming key selling season?well spent? . Are resellers receiving co-op payments for activities . Is the management overhead required for your they can't even remember doing?co-op budget and planning process out of balance, in itself limiting the co-op marketing you can . Are the compliance and auditability challenges of accomplish? your co-op program leading to undue administrative attention, and less focus on selling?. Can you execute reseller marketing programs within the short timeframes demanded by today's dynamic . Have competitors started to outflank you with more and hyper-competitive markets? effective co-op programs, even though they offer an inferior product?. Can you guarantee coordination of timing and messages for product launches? . Are you concerned about how your resellers represent your brand in their local markets?
IMPROVING YOUR CO-OP MARKETING PROGRAM LIKELY REPRESENTS YOUR SINGLE LARGEST REVENUE OPPORTUNITY
Marketing at the manufacturer's level has become notably more sophisticated in the past decade with cascading closed-loop planning processes, Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) metrics, and near-real-time program tracking facilitated by the Internet. However, the tools and controls available for managing co-op marketing have generally lagged behind. And this is true despite the fact that the reseller marketing activities supported by your co-op funds are typically closest to the customer and are critically important to brand communications and demand generation.
One of the major challenges facing manufacturers' marketing teams in their efforts to make reseller co-op marketing more effective is at the very heart of what defines the century-old co-op marketing concept -- the coordination and execution of programs and financial transactions across two separate organizations. Today, when the manufacturer is working with hundreds if not thousands of different resellers, the scale and breadth of the effort can be overwhelming. However breakthroughs are not only possible today, but quite achievable by applying specialized and fully integrated technology solutions, bringing co-op marketing management into the modern age.
Short of applying integrated technology solutions, manufacturers often fall into a mix of these following traditional methods and practices:
Develop and distribute "Co-op Kits" - Often due to the challenge of supporting a large reseller network, manufacturers resort to this classic "spray and pray" model. Resellers receive a package containing a situation brief and creative assets (either in the package or via a link to a web site containing static, centrally prepared content). Resellers customize from there, finding their own vendors, developing their own marketing plans, negotiating media rates, etc. Skills which smaller resellers often lack. Additionally, these steps consume a major portion of total co-op funding and actual execution that reaches the consumer may represent a shockingly low percentage of the total money spent. Manufacturers are often frustrated when they see their carefully researched messages, graphic designs, and even basic selling points lost in the process, and execution is often weeks or months later than desired. Resellers know they will be at least partially reimbursed for their expenses but this process is often unpredictable in amount and timing. Worst case? They may not get reimbursed at all because the activity was "off message" or "not in brand compliance".
Multiple Creative Platforms - The second common approach for co-op marketing... [download for more]
