Customer Reviews

Co-Branding: The Science of Alliance

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This book is fascinating, but it does leave out past researchers Varadarajan (1987): Simonin and Ruth (1998) who have both written theories into co-branding. It only looked at co-branding from a business viewpoint and not a customer attitude viewpoint. The book linked branding and co-branding, with a wide definition of the co-branding process. As a marketer, researching the subject, I feel the book only scratched the surface of co-branding and the endless opportunitites were not defined. It provided a good backdrop of merits and risks of co-branding but did not state the most important challenges, to marketers.

The Science of Alliance; it's a great title for a great, undervalued branding topic. Co-branding can be a simple short-term dual promotion or a long-term strategy in which brands, organizations and other entities may be strongly involved (take Wintel f.e. if you know what I mean). There is some good scientific research on the subject around now, published since the mid nineties in the journals of the AMA. None of it in this book however (as noticed by EM). It's the usual business cases, risks and pitfalls, a retailers perspective... even a small article on legal issues. Obviously, this is neither a science nor an IDEA book! What would be really interesting for example is how a co-branding perspective could be integrated in the development of new products, or even better: how can co-branding lead to better (perceived!) products, services and organizations? From Interbrand you might expect an article on (co-branding) naming strategies. There are a lot of missed chances here, but what do you expect from the first 120 printed bookpages on co-branding? The high price makes it double expensive.

This book is fascinating, but it does leave out past researchers Varadarajan (1987): Simonin and Ruth (1998) who have both written theories into co-branding. It only looked at co-branding from a business viewpoint and not a customer attitude viewpoint. The book linked branding and co-branding, with a wide definition of the co-branding process. As a marketer, researching the subject, I feel the book only scratched the surface of co-branding and the endless opportunitites were not defined. It provided a good backdrop of merits and risks of co-branding but did not state the most important challenges, to marketers.

its gives you a pretty good idea of the purpose and nature of cobranding but this being a new product and strategy utilised by corporations and small companies it is impossible to get a very specific understanding of it.