By M. Isi Eromosele

In a society where individualism and competition are considered to be the hallmarks of a free market economy, it is not surprising that organizations are slow to recognize, and in many cases reluctant to implement, collaborative marketing strategies.

Collaboration within this context refers to any marketing activity whose effect is to create synergies, leverage resources, or to address multiple problems with a single effort. This is not to suggest that cooperative strategies do not exist, quite the contrary, but their active development is at best sporadic and frequently unbalanced.

Business marketing has undergone and continues to undergo an evolutionary change over the last twenty five years. Advancements in technology, intensified competition, scarcity of resources and customer lifestyle adjustments have all contributed to our contemporary business culture of doing more with less.

Most global organizations, in an initial effort to address these mounting pressures, turn their attention inward, focusing on achieving greater efficiency by reorganizing their internal operations. Cross-functional coordination, flat organizations, inventory control, the elimination of needless redundancy are all explored.

Two new elements are coming into the forefront of global marketing, expanding beyond traditional organizational borders: strategic partnering and relationship marketing.

Strategic partnering builds on the fundamental principle that it is everyone’s responsibility within a given supply chain to actively contribute value to the end consumer. If something is not adding value, it should either be eliminated or have its cost reduced until it is adding value.

Relationship marketing builds on the principle that it is easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one. This area of marketing is still in its formative stages with companies just beginning to explore how to form and sustain strategic partnerships with their customers.

While there is yet much to explore within the scope of building and managing collaborative marketing organizations, current practices continue to reflect a global view based primarily on an adversarial or competitive business model. These efforts reflect an excessive focus on business self-interest on the part of most companies.

Although organizations have begun to recognize the necessity for cooperation in an interconnected global environment, these same organizations have been reluctant to consider how their customers might independently benefit from collaborative strategies.

Consider these fundamentals. Every exchange involves at least two parties. Everyone engaged in an exchange does so with the belief that they are deriving value from the transaction.

In this case, value simply being that the benefits outweighs the costs. As in this context, collaboration has largely been addressed from the seller’s perspective. How about the needs of the customer? Surely consumers bring similar concerns and interests to the process of exchange.

Internal And External Collaboration

Collaborative marketing has implications for both the buyer and the seller. Just like an organization, every customer has a set of internal operations they must execute before, during and after each transaction. In the case of the consumer, internal operations are

understood to be the cognitive, emotional and behavioral processes that he/she engages in when acquiring or disposing of a good or service.

The classic marketing assumption is that problem recognition occurs whenever a consumer sees a meaningful difference between their pain and their need or desire. From a competitive frame of mind, every product, every problem is therefore competing for the consumer’s most immediate attention.

The excessive emphasis on competition contributes to the maelstrom of daily marketing messages that now bombard the typical consumer. The collaborative problem-solving strategy is very straightforward. Companies need to develop and/or illustrate how their products and services are related to a variety of others in solving collective customer current and future needs.

In effect, you are helping the customer to accomplish multiple tasks with little additional effort.

Marketing of these multiple product/service benefits can take one of two forms. First, by communicating these additional benefits directly to the consumer, you are enhancing or leveraging the collective benefits that they can derive out of a given transaction. This is very similar to the benefits derived out of simultaneously solving multiple problems.

The second major use of this technique is to communicate directly with the role set members. Since the role set may also have some of their needs satisfied through the consumption process of another person, they in effect have a vested interest in favorably influencing the other consumer’s behavior. At a minimum, but by no means trivial, the role set is less likely to actively engage in behavior that directly competes for the consumer’s attention.

Although some progress has been made in the business arena, first with respect to systems integration and next in the arena of strategic partnerships, very little if any progress has been made in trying to help consumers benefit from the same level of integration.

Showing a consumer how they can solve multiple problems or simultaneously meet the needs of different people can be a tremendous benefit for consumer as well as the company.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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