Heading for office we often like to grab a coffee and while buying it, if we spot another brand selling cookies or sandwiches, the urge to have a complete meal comes to our mind. This is the advantage that co-branding brings across for its customers. Retailers’ theses days are working around developing co-branded outlets to enhance and entice their customers and also attract the ones that are not yet on their customer base.

The latest from the co-branding bandwagon is Café Coffee Day which has entered into an alliance with Sony’s PlayStation. Sony PSP will be setting up kiosk’s across Café Coffee Day’s outlets in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. Co-branding as we all know is the format where in two or more brands club together at one retail space. With putting co-branding in action you can provide your customer with ‘best of all worlds’ synergy. It may seem easy to club two related things together… but it requires extensive and exhaustive research and cannot be taken up just capriciously amongst two brands. A research needs to be carried out beforehand to see what kind of a response would they elicit when clubbed together.

Financial benefits are one of the prime grounds for forming an alliance and that is definitely fulfilled in a co-branding activity. This means lower costs and increased profits. It helps to connect well with the customers and offer greater value to them. It also brings along the benefit of strengthening a brand position among competition while operational advantages.

Though co-branding poses a lot of advantages for brands it also brings along with it certain disadvantages as well. If research is not carried out well and you partner with a poor performing brand than it may bring down your brand’s image as well. The combined strength of the co-branding brands should result in a higher brand strength and thus lower risk for the co-branded offer. Successful co-branding occurs when both brands add value to a partnership.

Co-branding for sure is an effective exercise; all you need to do is to adopt more methodical procedures for identifying ‘brand’ associates and approaches for shared brand augmentation.