Every week many new alliances are being announced and not every announcement is crystal clear on what the parties have in mind. Most often the element what the announcement brings to the customer seems to be forgotten. The parties forget to transform the power an announcement can bring into commercial opportunities by leaving the customer benefit out. Still every week there are some alliance announcements that jump out of the pact. Each of them for different reasons. Let’s have a look at some announcements of this week:
Diabetics and Oncology
In Japan Kyowa Hakko Kirin and Otsuka Pharmaceutical announced a new strategic alliance with focus on the fields of diabetes and oncology. The alliance will bring the firms together to do joint research into new cancer therapies. In addition Kyowa Hakko Kirin will also receive exclusive Japanese development and marketing rights to Otsuka’s diabetic agent saxagliptin. No word about the benefit for the end user or customer in this announcement, it is only about what the two companies will gain from working together.
Gold and base-metal mineralization
In Canada Virginia and Altius will cooperate to explore geological settings favorable for gold and base-metal mineralization on the north coast of Quebec and in Labrador. In this alliance the two companies will not only join forces by merging teams and sharing experience, knowledge and tools, but also jointly seek for new additional partner to execute upon new projects in the region. The customer benefit for the two companies to partner is not available in the announcement they hardly explain the benefits to the two partners nor the reasoning behind the partnership.
Curaçao
In an extensive press release CTEX, the Curaçao Technology Exchange, VCE and Zuora announce to have established a strategic alliance. Although being very extensive the press release is full of technical details and the benefits remain concentrated on technical features rather than real benefits. Perhaps the target audience is a technical audience that immediately understands the technical details and recognizes the benefit of “extensive redundant access”, “a secured cloud environment” and “an advanced multi-lingual Appstore”. My best guess is that the overall promise of the alliance is to offer the customers easy IT with worry free good nights of sleep.
Your challenge:
Think about these alliance announcements; what can you learn from them that will inspire ideas for your alliances and for the creation of the commercial power of your alliance announcements?