Brand Alliance. Building Block for Scientific Organisations’ Marketing Strategy

This paper addresses management issues of brand alliances as part of a scientific organisation’s marketing strategy. Though brand alliances have become quite popular with consumer products they seem to be exceptions in the marketing context of academic or scientific organisations. Against this background, the paper develops a brand alliance approach considering requirements of strategically marketing scientific organisations. As a starting point, brand alliances are discussed as a sub-category to brand combinations. Furthermore, opportunities for scientific organisations associated with the alliance approach are elucidated as well as, from a more general perspective, major threats. In the following course, the paper focuses on modelling a framework of customer-based brand alliance effects, referring to the behavioural sciencebased view of brands which conceptualises brands as the psychological reaction to the exposure of brand elements like a name, logo or symbols. In that context, prerequisites for success are examined as well. Further, essential components of a brand alliance management process are discussed and its application to scientific organisations is expounded. Aspects like, e.g., choosing and evaluating a partner brand, positioning a brand alliance or monitoring brand alliance performance are illuminated. In regard to practical application also factors and requirements for organisation’s brand alliance success are outlined.