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Why Branding Should Be at the Center of Channel Marketing

Blog: The Tibco Blog

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Your channel partners are an extension of your sales force. You are better together. Have you considered how, like your organization’s brand identity, the brand identity of your partnerships within the channel is also one of the first impressions for your mutual customers and prospects? Does your partner marketing strategy include how the brand of your partnerships represents the value of what you can do together?

Brand and communication professionals contribute their expertise and insights to ensure sales strategy and business plans are well aligned to their organization’s corporate brand identity. We must also do the same for our channel partners. However, with partners, we have the complexity of exponentially more business plans to align with. So, as is the case with most things partner-related, the challenge becomes how to scale the process for efficiency and consistency and make it easy for the partner. 

Why a Partnership Brand? We Need Each Other

Partners are focused on speed to market and differentiating their solutions and services to drive awareness, pipeline, and revenue. Vendors need their channel partners to scale their technology and source more deals. Let’s face it: we need each other. 

One brand should not overshadow the other or break the sacred brand guidelines of the other. We need each other to make our partnerships mutually successful, so we must also respect each other’s corporate brand identity. 

That all sounds great, and like we are about to summit the mountain with a hand reaching out to help another reach the top, but what’s missing here is the focus on how we represent the value of the partnership in go-to-market and demand-gen activities and make it quick and easy for partners to leverage the vendor’s brand while retaining their own identity. 

The partner experience is a priority for creating partner success. When the partner succeeds, then the vendor succeeds. Partner success includes fostering a brand that represents the value of the partnership and making it easy to deliver.  

Building a Successful Partnership Brand

Creating an effective partnership brand requires a thorough understanding of key players’ changing rules in your landscape. While partner and customer roles were once distinct (with customers at the top of the pyramid and partners at the bottom), emerging channels are blurring those lines. Partners are becoming more like customers, and customers are becoming more like partners. 

Sometimes, we can get so deep into the partnership that customers can’t distinguish your partner’s brand from your own. Neither you nor your partners should autonomously dictate each other’s branding strategy. 

From a vendor’s perspective, creating a consistent brand for your partnerships will not only create brand recognition that equally shares the limelight between your beloved corporate brand and your cherished partner’s brand. And just as importantly, you will create brand recognition for your best-in-class partner program. 

Hybrid is the New Go-to for B2B Marketing in 2022

To leverage the value of digital and hybrid experiences that engage with design and virtual experiences, the partnership brand must be accessible and ready to be deployed. 


When the partner succeeds, then the vendor succeeds. Partner success includes fostering a brand that represents the value of the partnership and making it easy to deliver. 
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In light of the growing need for businesses to foster the partner experience and provide the tools and resources needed to go to market and generate demand on behalf of a powerful partnership, TIBCO has created a branding guide. The guide is designed to help its partner organizations bolster their marketing efforts by tapping into the power of working together better.

Download the new TIBCO Brand and Style Guide for Partners to learn more.

Want More Best Practices for Channel Marketing and Partner Programs?

Read a recent blog by Senior Director of Partner Marketing, Samantha Patel, featuring our new Advanced Marketing Playbook for TIBCO partners

Sign up for this roundtable on February 15, 2022—where IDC Global Channel Analyst Steve White and a panel of TIBCO partner leaders will discuss actionable insights on the evolving channel landscape, how the 2022 TIBCO Partner Program stacks up, and how to drive mutual success in 2022.

You can also learn more about how TIBCO will deliver partner success in 2022. Susan Beaver, Director of Partner Programs, Success, and Operations, lays it all out in her blog: Key Focuses for 2022 TIBCO Partner Success in the Channel.

The post Why Branding Should Be at the Center of Channel Marketing first appeared on The TIBCO Blog.

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