A few weeks ago we wrapped up our Resellers blog series--a group of posts that exposed some of the potential downsides of working with resellers. While, for many branded companies, working with resellers is a requisite and fruitful part of their business strategy, the act of relinquishing total control over marketing and sales can negatively impact both the bottom line and the brand’s reputation. Again and again that series of posts stressed the need to know exactly who is selling your brand, how they are selling your brand, and where they are selling your brand. Only through a combination of working with trusted partners, careful monitoring, and clear agreements with resellers can both sides truly benefit.

As both a dancer and a devoted wearer of Adriano Goldschmied (AG) jeans, I was intrigued by the company’s newest social media campaign on Tumblr, the latest in a series of companies using dancers as models. The campaign includes images of dancers taken by famed dance photographer Dane Shitugi of The Ballerina Project and asks Tumblr users to share their own images with the hashtag #whatmovesme. Director of global communications, Johnathan Crocker, hoped the campaign would provide a “viral component” to the brand's marketing initiatives.

Our post on GoPro and Greentoe began to discuss the potential impact of affiliate marketing on partner bidding. Today’s blog is going to look at an apparel brand, Converse, and the ways that affiliates of its partner retailers can play a role in partner bidding. Again, everything in this post is going to be entirely “legal” as far as a search engine is concerned; our question is whether this kind of marketing might be harmful for a brand and, if so, what the brand can do about it.

For many brands, the primary, even sole, concern when it comes to working with a reseller is whether they drive sales effectively. We think, however, that brands should pay almost equal attention to the experience a customer has at a partner website. While working with retailers can be advantageous for a brand, the very real downside is that you have little control over what kind of experience your consumer might have once they reach your partner’s site. The range of negative experiences a consumer might have is vast--from misleading copy to poor customer service or slow delivery times--and these negative feelings may end up reflecting back on you and your brand, rather than on the retailer. Should this happen, the positives about working with a reseller are largely undercut.

For many brands, sales through retail partners vastly outnumber their direct sales, making partner bidding an essential part of a marketing and sales plan. But is there a point at which that kind of symbiotic relationship turns toward the negative? This post will walk through what positive partner bidding might look like for a brand like this, using Villeroy & Boch, a brand that manufactures fine china, as an example. It will also give a couple of examples of when a brand might want to step in and curtail its partners’ search advertising.

To say that Seattle loves their football would be an understatement: the Seahawks are basically a religion around here. And, while it pains my San Francisco-born-and-bred heart, it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement about football season—and about the Seahawks (just don’t tell my dad!).

The issue at the core of partner bidding is the lack of control that brands have to enforce rules and regulations regarding how resellers use their brand terms. This blog post will look at what harmful partner bidding most often looks like and begin to explain the options a brand has to protect against it. Future posts will go into more depth about industry specific types of problematic partner bidding and the steps that a brand can take to minimize the impact.

When it comes to brands that that both sell their own products and work through retail partners, issues surrounding brand bidding can be complex and confusing. While we have written about these issues before, both in our Report on Hotels, OTAs, and Paid Search and in a blog post we published in January, the fact of the matter is that there is no single answer or absolute best practice. On the one hand, resellers bidding on a brand’s terms allow that company’s products to dominate the search results and increase the chance of a sale. On the other hand, partner bidding may cut into profits and potentially harm your customers’ experience with your brand. Direct sales may be lost, customers could have negative experiences on your resellers’ sites, and resellers may even make false promises in their advertising.

As you may have seen, Google announced last Thursday that in late September they will be doing away with the option to disable close variant keyword matching on exact and phrase match keywords. In brief, marketers could previously target their ads to exact strings that people search for—or to particular phrases that people include in their searches. Now, the only option is to also target what Google calls “misspellings, singulars/plurals, acronyms, abbreviations, accents and stemmings,” when using exact and phrase match. TechCrunch offered a good overview of the change shortly after it was announced. Generally, the announcement has garnered some negative reactions among marketers as illustrated in this Marketing Land post, which highlights various responses to the new policy.

Everyone enjoys being recognized for the work they do, and here at BrandVerity we’re no different! We’re thrilled to be one of ABestWeb’s “Best Of’s” for 2013, taking home the prize for “Best Affiliate Tool.” Some excellent technology services were nominated, so we were honored to be chosen.