Collaborative Marketing is a special type of marketing where a brand collaborates with other brands for promotion and advertising. The American Marketing Association dictionary does not have Collaborative Marketing, but a similar term ‘Collaborative Agreement’, which is defined as, “A collaborative agreement is a cooperation strategy between companies to jointly pursue a common goal“. It is also referred to as a strategic alliance or global strategic partnership.
Mostly, brands utilize social media for collaborative marketing, with brands that have shared audience or values. Collaboration marketing is one of the most powerful ways to not just survive but thrive in highly competitive markets.
In India, Zomato, Blinkit, and Netflix are among the most popular brands. Zomato and Blinkit are in food and grocery delivery business, and Netflix is a global streaming platform. All the three brands are highly active on social media and are known for their quirky and amusing posts.
The collaboration started on OOH (Out of home media) – billboards with messages based on popular Bollywood movie dialogue. Blinkit posted – “Doodh mangoge, doodh denge (Ask for milk, we will deliver it), while the slogan on the billboard of food delivery service Zomato was “Kheer mangoge, kheer denge (Ask for kheer, we will deliver it).
Then, Netflix, the powerhouse of entertainment, appeared with tagline, “Wednesday mangoge, Friday denge.”
Netflix put the image of all the three billboards on their official Twitter account, and tweeted, “It’s a great day to go out and look at billboards.” The tweet got more than 18K likes. The three brands continued entertainment on tweet with replies to each other, creating a viral trend on the Twitter.
Brands like Spotify and Uber have used Collaborative marketing in the past. Probably, this was a first for Indian audience.
Pulse, the famous candy brand, and the market leader, is also trying Collaborative marketing. Pulse has put up billboards and on twitter it is complimenting other brands as ‘pulse of India’. For example, Pulse congratulated Airtel – “Giving superfast 5G speeds to millions, you are the pulse of India’s next generation. Location: 353, Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, Sikanderpur, Sultanpur, New Delhi”
Pulse also took some inspirations from the earlier Zomato case, and congratulated Zomato – “Dosa ho ya Gulab Jamun, our Pulse will beat for you! Thank you for being the main course of our hunger.”
I think this new experiment of collaborative advertising using multiple media channels like billboard and social media will continue and hopefully, as consumers, we shall see some more interesting and engaging content.