Joint venture marketing is a subset of the relationship marketing family philosophy, but applies relationship marketing principles in a different way, which ideally helps to stimulate growth and strong relationships. Where relationship marketing focuses first on customer relationships, joint venture marketing increases the focus to include business partner relationships, which will ultimately foster and further customer relationships.

To be sure, joint venture marketing focuses as much on customer relationships as does traditional relationship marketing, but takes this focus to another realm with the idea of forging new and even stronger customer relationships.

The Fundamentals of a Joint Venture Partnership

In a joint venture marketing partnership, your company or business will join forces with one of more companies to facilitate stronger marketing practices and strategies for each member of the partnership. These new marketing practices and strategies include ways to organically produce solid customer relationships that will potentially yield long-term relationships.

With a successful joint venture marketing partnership, one of the first steps to creating a larger customer base is to work on building strong relationships with your partners. The stronger your partner relationships, the stronger your customer relationships will be. There is a trickle down cause and effect relationship between strong joint venture marketing partnership relationships and strong customer relationships. This is what the principles of joint venture marketing are built on, and what differentiates joint venture marketing from relationship marketing.

Trickle Down Effect

The idea behind developing a joint venture marketing partnership is to benefit from the mutual experience and expertise of your partners. You may have a great and loyal customer base, but unless you extend this customer base, your business is unlikely to grow. Partnering with other businesses to share marketing strategies and ideas, and to implement these ideas as a group, is an extremely effective way to expand your customer base.

But in order to develop a new customer base that is as loyal as your current customer base, you must develop strong relationships with your joint venture marketing partners. The strength of relationships with new customers that you make as a result of your joint venture marketing partnership is a direct reflection of the strength of your business relationships. If you form a joint venture marketing partnership, and do not put much effort into developing relationships with your partners via working together for a common goal, this will be evident to your new clients, and these relationships will ultimately not grow to their full potential.

Part of this reality is determined by something extremely simple: human nature. People tend to go out of their way to help people they feel like they share something with, and someone they feel close to. This is just as true in business as it is in personal life. But, this also cannot be fabricated.

You may not actually like all your joint venture marketing partners, or want to be friends with them, but you can take an interest in them and their specific business, which will open the doors of communication. Once you're established a solid professional relationship based on mutual respect, your partners will be more willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to help you succeed. You may want to be the first one to step up to the plate and take the extra step or provide additional information or help to one of your partners, and this will certainly be reciprocated. A happy well functioning relationship with your joint venture marketing partners will translate into stronger customer relationships, and eventually, a bigger bottom line.