Marketing and partnerships

Marketing strategy and partnership development: two neighbouring trades

In short: Marketing decides who you address, with what promise and instead of what alternative; it works on an audience. Partnership development negotiates an exchange with an organisation that already holds access to that audience; it works on a relationship. The purposes converge; the skills, the pace and the failure modes do not.

Three layers coexist under the word marketing, and separating them is useful because they are neither decided at the same moment nor by the same people. The first is strategic: it settles who you address, what you promise them, instead of what you propose yourself, and what you accept not to be. The second is acquisition: by which routes the attention of those people can be met, at what cost and with what regularity. The third is execution: the texts, the images, the pages, the messages, everything that makes the promise perceptible. Beginning with the third is the easiest confusion to fall into, because it is the only visible one and the only one whose output can be shown. A company that rebuilds its site, opens an account on a network and publishes steadily has produced a great deal of execution without taking a single strategic decision; the work is real, it simply answers no question. The reverse order is less comfortable, because the first layer produces nothing that can be shown: it produces things given up.

A marketing strategy amounts to a small number of decisions, each of which excludes something. Who are you addressing, given that choosing a segment is first of all a list of people you stop aiming at. Instead of what are you proposing yourself, a question that requires naming the real alternative: a competitor, an improvised in-house arrangement, a professional from another trade, or inaction, which is an alternative in its own right. On which criterion are you preferable, which requires keeping one rather than listing them all. And what makes that preference credible, since a promise without proof is one more assertion in a market where everyone asserts. These decisions are taken on incomplete information and they get revised, but they must be taken: as long as they are not, every execution trade-off — which text, which route, which offer to put forward — is settled by the mood of the day, and successive efforts do not add up because they do not point in the same direction.

Partnership development pursues the same purpose — meeting people you cannot reach alone — by a route of a different nature. Its unit of work is not an audience but an organisation, with its own objectives, its own calendar, its internal constraints and contacts who do not all have the same interest in the agreement existing. You do not target a partner, you offer them an exchange, which presupposes understanding first what they are looking for: serving a request they receive without knowing how to handle it, completing an offer whose gaps they know, having a legitimate reason to get back in touch with their own customers, shedding a task they perform badly, or looking complete against a competitor who is. The skills involved are not those of acquisition: they consist in qualifying, approaching, listening to an objection, writing down what has been agreed and sustaining a relationship over time. The pace differs too. A campaign starts when you decide it does; an agreement depends on a decision you do not take yourself and advances at the speed of the slower of the two organisations.

The confusion between the two trades is explained by a shared vocabulary and is paid for in misplaced expectations. The same words — visibility, audience, awareness, image — serve to describe both, although they do not designate the same objects in each. The failure modes, by contrast, bear no resemblance. A badly designed campaign fails in silence: nobody answers, nobody notices, you start again elsewhere having damaged nothing. A badly designed partnership fails loudly: an undelivered commitment, a dissatisfied audience or a misunderstood exclusivity leave a mark on a relationship that existed before and will go on existing afterwards. Scaling differs just as much. A paid route amplifies by putting more into it, until its audience is exhausted; a partnership does not amplify that way, because it is not multiplied by spending but by the number of relationships an organisation can genuinely sustain, which is small. A company that treats its partnerships as a volume channel soon discovers that it has signed agreements nobody has time to keep alive.

A few overlaps remain to be set aside. Neither marketing nor partnership is selling: they prepare an encounter, they qualify, they make a preference possible, but somebody then has to hold a conversation and close. Confusing the two leads to judging preparatory work on an outcome that depends on another skill. The word partner also deserves watching, since usage makes it cover three different situations. An advertiser or a patron brings means in exchange for exposure or an association of image: the relationship stays close to a purchase of space, with an added dimension of reputation. An introducer directs enquiries to a third party in exchange for an agreed consideration: that is a commercial relationship, not an association. A partner in the proper sense stakes something of their own — their recommendation, access to their customers, their name — in an operation from which they expect a benefit they cannot obtain alone. Using the same word for these three situations leads to negotiating one as though it were another, then being surprised that the commitment obtained is not the one you thought.

Positioning, audience, channels, measurement — and what a partnership is

In short: A positioning is a relative place in the mind of someone who is comparing, not a slogan. An audience is described by a situation and a trigger rather than by a category. A channel is a route towards attention that already exists, and you reach it by paying, by producing, or by borrowing someone else’s. That third case is where partnership sits, and it is paid for in reputation rather than in money.

A positioning is neither a slogan nor a description of the offer: it is the place a company occupies in the mind of a person at the moment that person compares. It is stated in three inseparable elements: for whom, instead of what, on which criterion. The second is the only one that can be left out without the statement looking incomplete, although it governs the other two — as long as you have not named what the person would do if you did not exist, you do not know what you are arguing against and you answer objections nobody raises. The third must be singular in the strict sense: claiming quality, price, service and closeness all at once amounts to claiming none of them, since everyone says as much and nothing is left to decide with. A simple test reveals the presence or absence of a positioning: there must be customers it designates as not being for you, and enquiries it leads you to decline. A statement that makes you give up nothing is not a positioning, it is a presentation.

Audience is the second object, and a common definition of it — an age, an occupation, a company size, a sector — is the least operative. Those categories describe who people are, not what sets them in motion. The useful description starts from a situation and a trigger: what happens in someone’s life or business for the subject to become suddenly urgent, and at what precise moment they start looking. Two people with nothing else in common may share the same trigger, and two companies strictly comparable on paper are not at the same point in that path. A further distinction changes how you write as soon as a decision involves more than one person: whoever will use is not always whoever decides, nor whoever pays, nor whoever can block without deciding anything. Finally, the market — everyone who could buy — must be separated from the reachable audience, meaning those you are actually in a position to touch with the means you have. Confusing the two produces attractive reasoning about a potential with no indication of how it would be reached.

A channel is neither a tool nor a platform: it is a route by which attention that already exists can be borrowed. That definition has an immediate practical consequence: the starting point of the choice is not what the company knows how to do, but where the people concerned already are and the frame of mind they are in while there. Three families are distinguished by what you give in exchange. You pay: buying space, in its older or more recent forms, buys defined exposure to an audience that belongs to someone else. You produce: content, public answers, presence in the places where the subject is discussed, which costs time and constancy rather than money. You borrow: a third party’s audience is made available because that third party finds an interest in it, and this is the domain of partnership and referral. Each family has its own reversibility. What you pay for stops dead as soon as you stop paying. What you produce remains, but takes time to bear and decays if abandoned. What you borrow does not stop by itself, but cannot be taken back either, since it depends on a will that is not yours.

The difference between a partnership and a purchase of advertising space is not one of price but of nature. In a purchase of space, the transaction is complete: you pay a sum, you obtain exposure whose terms are known in advance, and the relationship ends at the deadline without the medium having taken any position on what you are worth. That is precisely what makes it convenient — it can be bought, compared, repeated — and it is also what bounds its effect, since the audience knows that a slot can be bought and reads the message accordingly. A partnership rests on the opposite: the organisation that associates itself stakes something no payment replaces, its recommendation, and behind it the trust its customers grant it. A customer disappointed by what it recommended will hold it against them, not against you; the risk they take is one of reputation, it is asymmetric, and it bears on what they would find hardest to rebuild. From this follows the rule that governs everything after: a partner does not accept because the case was well presented, they accept because they draw from the agreement a benefit their own plan does not give them.

That benefit can be described, and naming it before approaching avoids most refusals. It takes a few regular forms: serving a request they receive without knowing how to handle it, which spares them saying no; completing an offer whose gaps they know; having a legitimate reason to get back in touch with their own customers; shedding a task they perform without pleasure or competence; or looking complete against a competitor who is. Symmetrically, what breaks a partnership comes down to a small number of causes. The consideration was never stated, each side having assumed the other would make the first move. The effort is asymmetric and one of the two notices after having done the work. The agreement rests on a single person and dies the day they change role, because nobody else knows why it exists. The partner discovers competition where they expected complementarity. Or a badly served customer traces the matter back to them and they withdraw their name without discussion. An agreement that has anticipated this last case — who answers, how quickly, who informs whom — survives the incident; an agreement that has not, stops there.

Measurement, finally, only makes sense if you know which link it applies to. A chain connects exposure — the number of people who had the opportunity to see —, attention, response, the identified contact, then the customer. Each link has its own measure and none prejudges the next: a route may excel at exposure and produce nothing afterwards, which is usable information rather than an overall failure. Two difficulties are worth knowing. The first is attribution: when a person has met a company on repeated occasions before contacting it, crediting the last point of contact is convenient and false, and that convenience mechanically condemns slow routes and recommendations, which occur early. The second is specific to partnerships: a spoken recommendation leaves no technical trace and no tool will reconstruct it. The only reliable method is to ask those who arrive what brought them there, accepting that this answer will be imprecise but pointed the right way rather than precise and wrong.

From diagnosis to follow-up: how this work is conducted

In short: Start from the business already won and from where the chain breaks, write a positioning that excludes and have it restated by people who do not know you, keep few routes and sustain them, qualify partners by shared audience before approaching them, then periodically review what is still alive and what no longer is.

Diagnosis starts from what has already been sold rather than from what you would like to sell. Reconstructing the origin of the most recent deals — not from the tools, which keep only a partial trace, but by asking the people concerned how they arrived and what decided them — teaches in one conversation what no amount of reasoning finds. To that is added the other half, almost always neglected: those who asked for a quote and went no further, whose reason for stepping back is the most useful material there is. The purpose of this examination is to locate where the chain breaks, because four very different breaks complain in the same terms. You may not be known to the people concerned. Known without being understood, the offer being described in internal vocabulary. Understood without being preferred, for want of a reason to choose this one rather than another. Or preferred without the enquiry going through, because a step discourages or an answer is slow to come. Each calls for a distinct remedy, and three of them are not treated by increasing visibility.

Defining the positioning is conducted as a constrained writing exercise. You draft a single statement saying for whom, instead of what, and on which criterion; the exercise looks trivial until you notice that it forces decisions left open between people who believed they agreed. It is then put to three tests. The exclusion test: if no enquiry is set aside by this statement, it commits to nothing. The competitor test: if a competitor could sign the same sentence without lying, it says nothing about you. The restatement test: it is read to people who do not know the company, who are asked to say it again in their own words, which reveals without mercy what has been understood and what has not. Then comes the question of proof: every assertion kept calls for whatever makes it believable to someone who has no reason to trust you, and an assertion for which you cannot say what proof would accompany it is to be removed rather than repeated.

The choice of routes is made by elimination rather than by addition. You start from where the described audience already is, you set aside those where it is not whatever their apparent prestige, and you keep the smallest number of routes the company can genuinely sustain. This last criterion is decisive and often ignored: the cost of a route is not its entry cost but its upkeep cost, and a presence fed in fits and starts produces less than a modest presence fed without interruption. It is useful to separate two regimes explicitly. The test seeks to find out whether a route produces anything; it is run on a restricted scope, with a single message, and it requires having decided in advance what will count as a positive or negative answer, failing which you will conclude whatever you were hoping. Exploitation comes afterwards and consists in settling what worked into a sustainable routine. The common fault is to open several routes at once in a climate of urgency: none receives the attention required, none is conclusive, and the lesson taken is that none of them works.

Approaching partners begins with a list built on shared audience rather than on prominence. Against each name, you need to know whether that organisation already speaks, regularly and to the point, to the people you are trying to reach, and whether what it sells sits beside what you sell rather than opposite it. Prior qualification avoids most useless conversations: is the audience overlap real, is there a conflict with its current offer or with an agreement it has already made, and who, inside it, would have a personal interest in this existing — because an agreement that interests the organisation only in general never advances. The proposal is then framed from the partner’s problem rather than from your own: what they will be able to do that they do not do, what they will be able to stop doing, what they will be able to announce to their customers. A small, dated and reversible first move is better than an ambitious framework agreement: a limited operation is decided quickly, gets executed, and yields the only information that matters, namely whether the two organisations work well together.

What has been agreed is written down, including — and especially — between people who get along. The useful document is short and answers concrete questions: what each side does and by when, what each side may say about the other and in what form, what is exclusive and what is not, what becomes of the data of people who pass from one to the other, how each warns the other in case of incident, and how the agreement ends. Follow-up then rests on two meetings of different natures. One deals with routes and examines the measurement chain link by link, judging over a complete decision cycle rather than on an isolated variation. The other deals with partnerships and asks questions no dashboard contains: is this agreement still active or merely still signed, who carries it on each side, what has the other organisation changed since, and what does each side actually draw from it. That is where you decide to stop what no longer lives, a decision readily postponed because a dormant partnership costs nothing visible, while it occupies a place and sustains the illusion of a channel.

The mistakes that consume resources without shifting anything

In short: Speaking to everyone so as to exclude nobody, mistaking awareness for acquisition, signing partnerships whose consideration was never stated, measuring nothing or measuring only the last move, and changing the message before it has had any chance of being recognised.

The first mistake is speaking to everyone, and no negligence is needed to fall into it: the fear of losing business is enough. Turning down a segment looks costly when the order book is uncertain, so the statement is widened until it excludes nobody. The result is recognisable from a distance: a presentation listing everything the company knows how to do, a promise of adaptation to every situation, a vocabulary in which no term belongs to any particular trade. Nobody recognises themselves in it, because recognising a message presupposes that it has set someone else aside. The symmetric mistake exists and is found among those who took the lesson well: cutting so finely that what remains is not a reachable audience but a handful of cases, with nowhere to meet them and no volume to justify a route. Between the two, the workable criterion is twofold: the segment must be homogeneous enough for one sentence to touch its members, and identifiable enough that you can say where they are. A segment you can describe but cannot find is not yet one.

The second mistake is confusing being seen with being chosen. Visibility measures — views, followers, mentions, presence at an event — have two properties that explain their career: they are easily obtained and pleasantly displayed. They say nothing about the purchase decision, however, and it is common to watch them rise while no additional enquiry arrives. This does not mean awareness is useless: when a decision is taken rarely, when it commits for a long time, or when it comes through recommendation, being already known at the moment the need appears is exactly what makes the difference, and that work is done before it is needed. The mistake is therefore not to aim at awareness, it is to aim at it without saying so and to expect from it the effects of acquisition work. One test dispels the ambiguity: before committing to an action, write down what should happen if it succeeded, and at which link of the chain. If the answer is that you would be better known, the action belongs to awareness and will be judged as such; if the answer is that enquiries would arrive, you must be able to say by which route.

The third mistake is the partnership with no stated consideration, and it is recognisable by its enthusiasm. Two organisations that like each other conclude that they ought to work together, promise each other mutual support, sometimes announce their rapprochement publicly, and then do nothing about it — not out of bad faith, but because nobody ever said what each side would do, for whom, or by when. Three precise defects hide behind that general formula. The absence of a concrete, dated first action, which leaves the agreement in a state of indefinite intention. The absence of a name: nobody on either side is charged with keeping it alive, and an agreement carried by everyone is carried by nobody. The absence of explicit symmetry, which lets a situation settle in where one side regularly hands opportunities to the other without ever receiving any, notices late, and withdraws without explaining why. A confusion of vocabulary is worth watching too: announcing a partnership is not a commercial result but a publicly stated intention, and publishing it before it has produced anything exposes both organisations to having to explain later what became of it.

The fourth mistake concerns measurement and comes in two opposite guises. The first is absence: with no reference point, you keep what reassures and abandon what has not yet produced, which is often the reverse of what should be done, since slow routes are precisely the ones that have produced nothing at the moment of judging. The second is misdirected excess: measuring a great deal, but only what can be counted without effort. The last point of contact before an enquiry is the easiest to record, and crediting it with the whole merit amounts to crediting the front door with the work of the entire street. A company steering on that single indicator will first cut what occurs early — the recommendation, the presence where the subject is discussed, the content that made the name known — and will then observe that what remained no longer suffices. Two precautions make measurement honest without complicating it: systematically asking those who arrive what brought them there, and judging a route over a complete decision cycle rather than over the period during which you happen to be watching.

The fifth mistake gathers four habits that are often met together. Copying the positioning of a competitor who is doing well: you inherit their promise without their means, without their seniority and without the reasons that led them there, and you deliberately place yourself on the ground where they are strongest. Changing the message because you have grown tired of it: internal fatigue always arrives before external recognition, and a company that renews its promise as soon as it has heard it enough never leaves anyone time to associate it with its name. Promising what execution does not deliver: effective marketing laid over a failing service merely accelerates the encounter between customers and disappointment, and it turns a discreet problem into a reputation. Finally, entrusting knowledge of your audience to a third party to the point of no longer holding it: conversations with customers, reasons for refusal and recurring objections are the asset that makes every subsequent decision possible, and a company that stops gathering them itself depends on someone else’s interpretation to understand its own market.

When neither marketing nor partnership is the right answer

In short: An offer that answers no need cannot be rescued: marketing accelerates an encounter, it does not create desire. Some audiences have no intermediary holding their trust, and partnership has no grip there. When the problem sits after the sale, in an already saturated capacity, or in a decision nobody has taken, attracting more makes the situation worse rather than better.

The first limit is the hardest to hear. Marketing accelerates the encounter between an offer and people who need it; it does not manufacture the need, and no amount of work on the message converts indifference into desire. The signs of an offer without a market are recognisable and are rarely confused with a visibility problem. People understand perfectly well what is being proposed and do not want it: it is therefore not the explanation that is lacking. You harvest curiosity, congratulations, encouragement, and no enquiry — curiosity is a reaction to novelty, not to a lack. Those who try stop after trying without anything unfortunate having happened. Or the recurring answer is that they manage very well without it, which names the real alternative: inaction. In these situations, committing means to acquisition produces an expensive lesson whose content was already known. The useful work lies elsewhere: talking to those who said no, understanding what they do instead, and accepting that the conclusion may be to change the offer rather than its presentation.

The second limit concerns partnerships, which presuppose a condition whose absence cannot be compensated: an organisation must already hold access to the intended audience and the trust that comes with it. That condition is not always met. Some audiences are atomised, with no place, no structure and no natural intermediary; the decision is taken individually, in a private setting, and nobody is in a position to recommend anything. Others belong to a subject too sensitive for any organisation to associate its name with, whatever the quality of what is proposed: it is not the value that is in question, it is the reputational risk they decline to carry. It also happens that every plausible intermediary is in fact a competitor, present or future, in which case the complementarity you think you are offering reads to them as a threat. Finally, an audience captured by a very small number of dominant players is hardly worked through partnership, because those players have no reason to trade what they can sell. In such cases, insisting amounts to collecting polite refusals.

The third limit concerns where the problem sits. When what is lacking is not demand but the capacity to serve it, attracting more makes matters worse: lead times stretch, quality degrades, those who wait give up, and the company spends to manufacture opportunities it will not be able to honour. The same reasoning holds when the problem sits after the sale. If the customers won do not stay, acquisition funds their replacement instead of adding anything, and the useful work bears on what happens between first use and abandonment — a matter of the product, the service or the relationship, never of the message. A third case is harder to admit because there is nothing technical about it: when what blocks is a decision nobody has taken — what you stop selling, which customer you give up serving, what you invoice differently — no positioning work can take it in place of those who run the company. At best it will produce an elegant formulation of a maintained ambiguity, and that elegance will make the contradiction harder to see.

The fourth limit is one of timing. An offer that changes with every customer cannot be positioned: you cannot say what you give up when you have not yet decided it, and a statement produced in that state will be contradicted by the next deal accepted. The honest order is then to stabilise what is sold first, even on a very small number of cases, and to describe afterwards. There is an opposite and equally real situation: a company already receiving more enquiries than it handles does not need to prompt more; what would serve it is to sort better, to say sooner what it does not do, and possibly to revisit what it accepts. Finally, when the available means allow only an intermittent presence on a heavily contested route, the arithmetic is unfavourable: a discontinuous presence on crowded ground produces less than a constant presence on narrow ground, and concentrating is worth more than covering. Recognising this is not giving up, it is choosing the one place where the available effort can be noticed.

The fifth limit marks out what communication cannot honestly do. It does not repair a reputation damaged by facts: as long as the facts continue, any message contradicting them accelerates their circulation, and the only workable route runs through changing what produced them. It guarantees no result, because what you are seeking to obtain is somebody else’s decision, which depends on their means, their calendar, their priorities and a competitor who is also at work; what can be committed to bears on the work conducted and on how subsequent decisions will be taken, never on the market’s answer. It does not replace selling when the decision requires a conversation: in that case most of the effort must bear on the number and quality of the conversations obtained, not on the production of messages. And it should not serve to move what should not be moved: an offer known to be disappointing may sell once, and that sale will be paid for afterwards in what customers say about it, which is precisely the route no budget buys.