Brands and start-ups told to collaborate as ‘you are both in the survival business’
Image: The Corner Studio
Established brands and start-ups have been urged to collaborate more closely after being told that such partnerships could ensure the survival of both.
Joseph Jaffe, chief executive and co-founder of business matchmaker Evolution, insisted the marketing professionalism of brands and the creative minds of start-ups should join forces.
Too often start-ups are left to flounder with no access to cash when they could provide the answer to a brand’s creative problems, he said.
Thing about big brand vs startup is they have a far longer process to even start ideas or get them off the ground. I know because I worked on Enterprise level digital projects for over 6 years in the Australian market. Here is a normal big brand process to get a project off the ground, the more complex the brand the longer the process is drawn out – http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/.....6dff42.jpg
I think the example where they split the marketing budget and give 10% to startups is a good idea to set a side project for branding, yet full integration into a big brand is VERY complex.
Brands and agencies do need to be working closer with startups – but it’s a massively harder thing to do than say.
There’s many reasons for this – timescales, access, and alignment of strategies being the main ones. And Jaffe fell for the biggest reason I see with marketers and agencies wanting to work with startups – a misunderstanding of what it actually is that the startups do.
Startups don’t solve problems, they find them. If agencies and brands (and keynote speakers) don’t get this, everything else is trivial.
There are a few agencies and clients that understand and work well with startups. There are many who just want to be seen to be working with them. Thankfully we’re slowly seeing more of the latter, but there’s still a an order of magnitude more talk than action.
The advantages of co-branding in advertising extends past start ups. Virgin Mobile have joined with Oz Harvest in their new “making mobile better” campaigns