Making big money with your products or services doesn’t mean you have to spend big bucks. Riding the Coattails is a licensing strategy to get instant market recognition for your products or services. This strategy taps into the consumer awareness of well-known brands.
Many types of product and service companies – consumer goods, entertainment, technology, and others – spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their core brand and creating a big consumer market. Licensing lets you lease their brand equity and use it to sell your products or services. You’ve got a lot of licensing options with this strategy. For example, licensing a well-known sports franchise brand lets you take advantage of their broad consumer awareness. You get the added benefit of live games and ongoing advertising without the cost.
I used this strategy with a client who invented a new portable “bar and grill entertainment center” ideal for tailgating. Rather than spending big money to try to promote it “generically,” I helped them license several big college and professional football team brands. They branded the product with team logos and colors. Their products got immediate access to the big retailers, instant customer recognition, ongoing promotional support from the televised football games, and multiple “brand” promotions from the other licensing partners.
Licensing a bigger partner brand is also a way to multiply your marketing dollars. Oftentimes, you can tap into their ongoing promotional and advertising campaigns, sometimes for little or no money. A few years ago, I worked with a toy company and negotiated a license with a major studio for their animated movie releasing in the fall. To promote the movie, the studio wanted products to give away at the movie premiere. In return for supplying some toys, my client got extensive media coverage in newspapers and radio stations as part of the movie promotion.
Building market awareness and consumer demand is a costly undertaking. Especially if you are a small company or start-up with limited resources, you can use licensing to tap the resources of a bigger partner. If you are looking for a way to get promotional muscle behind your products or services, then “Riding the Coattails” could be the right licensing strategy for you.
