Dollars & Sense

Cross Promotions: Seeing Green

I’m at Sweetgreen, a salad-focused restaurant, and I spotted this sticker on the preparation window.  Sweetgreen is promoting Sullivan Street Bakery. Why would it dare do that? I believe it’s because it benefits Sweetgreen: people use a brand’s name to quickly deduce information, such as quality and value. People know that Sullivan Street Bakery is good. And, even if they don’t know it, they know that a bakery provided it and that it’s not from some stale loaf. 

Stand On the Shoulders of (Jolly Green) Giants
We promote services that we use on our company’s Partners page.  People know that Shop Local is not a security or website uptime expert.  Yet, I have to offer these features to my clients. Here is where the power of cross-promotion comes in:

• I can tell you that our platform is secure, but it means a lot more when I show you the logo of Cloudflare, a giant in providing website security, on our Partners page.
• I can tell members that we measure page speed and uptime, but showing you that we use Pingdom gives you more confidence.  

We’re not doing Cloudflare or Pingdom a favor when we show their logo. We need each other. It’s mutually beneficial.  

Help Yourself by Helping Others
A company can elevate itself by promoting other companies. It helps users know that its services (or bread in Sweetgreen’s case) are desirable and of high value.  One can gain esteem with customers by surrounding themselves with quality partners. For example, we promote that we work with Baccarat, Versace, and Juliska. Yes, we need authorized retailers to know we can help them sell these brands’ products, but these partnerships also help us look legitimate and trusted. 

Pay For Cross Promotion
We encourage our brand partners to promote us to their clients. We do this for the same reason Sweetgreen promotes Sullivan Street Bakery. The brands benefit when they tell stores that they work with us to lift online sales. Brands are not e-commerce experts and need to be in another company’s shadow in this space.

Brands win when they tout their partnership with us because it shows they can provide a quality online experience—even if that is not their strong suit. It makes the brand look good when it can say its partner (us) helps 1,200 retailers run their online stores. 

We offer brands materials to cross promote us in various areas, including:

• In emails.
• On the brand's website.
• In showroom displays.
• In catalogs and on business cards.

We even co-op ad dollars to brands to promote us. 

Who paid for that Rosemary Focaccia decal? Ideally, both chipped in.  Just ask Sweetgreen and Sullivan Street Bakery, there’s ‘green’ to be made in cross promotion. 

View our Partners page:
https://www.shoplocal.org/partners.cfm

Tags:
Cross promotion Sweetgreen Sullivan street bakery Juliska baccarat

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