Creating Collaboration Value: Meaning of Collaborators, Collaboration as Business process, Advantages and Drawbacks of Collaboration

Collaborators are any third parties that work directly with your company to support or assist in the development or execution of a strategy. Some common examples of collaborators include vendors, warehousers, and consultants.

Types:

Partners

Partners are any individuals with a formal interest in the success of a company. While all collaborators can be thought of as partners, this group specifically refers to business partners with a legal agreement in place.

Agencies

Agencies act as intermediaries and facilitators, connecting companies with other peoples and companies with skills they may need. An employment agency may provide a company with administrative staff, whereas a marketing agency could handle all of a company’s promotional needs.

Distributors

Distributors are responsible for a company’s supply chain. Not only do they maintain relationships with suppliers and vendors, they also house and facilitate the shipment of the company’s product.

Suppliers

Suppliers contribute not only the materials to make a company’s product, but as manufacturers are considered a supplier, they may create the product itself.

In defining your company’s collaborators, you also need to assess them for capability and commitment. A collaborator being unable to offer the support you need can have a serious impact on your operations, so it’s best to determine a collaborator’s capacity beforehand.

Collaboration as Business process

• An integrated business process which consists of relevant business processes across participating organisations.
• A set of mutually synchronized actions of peering and autonomous enterprises in order to conjointly provide an output for an external customer.
• An integrated business process which consists of relevant business processes across participating organizations.

Utilize the power of consumers

Collaborative marketing is more than collaborating with other organizations. Modern technology gives us better outreach to capture the voice of your target audience. This continues to develop as the use of social media and wide-reaching digital reviews expand.

Fulfill campaign goals

Use collaborations to strategically mask your weaknesses or promotional shortcomings. Broaden your outreach with collaborative marketing that syncs with your organization. Relatable organizations will have similar goals, marketing campaigns and target audiences. Create mutually beneficial marketing promotions with these companies to fulfill the needs of your team.

When you bring this idea to modern collaborative marketing, you’ll need systems in place to enable this creative collaboration. The marketing technology stack your team is using should be configured to make this process as smooth as possible.

It’s essential to have the basic collaborative tools in place. The most important solution for marketing collaboration is digital asset management (DAM). This used by modern organizations for optimal brand management and asset storage. With DAM, you can easily collaborate on projects with externals through features like collection links and portals.

Align with like-minded businesses

Increase your brand awareness with collaboration. Work with other brands to promote similar products, which increases the outreach and strength of the advertisement. The marketing powers of numerous brands come together to bolster your business and minimize budget spending.

Here’s a real life example of this in action. Two different reputable Hollywood companies produce a movie. Though they are competitors, they solidify the quality of the film by collaborating. The brands build off each other this way, masking weaknesses and developing strengths in the eyes of consumers.

Plan the entire collaboration process

A strong collaboration is preceded by a systematic planning of the entire collaboration process. Begin by researching companies that have similar goals, marketing, brand and products. Especially online, marketing collaborations are more effective with higher amounts of collaborative companies. The next step is meeting with the collaborators and setting guidelines and agreements with each of them.

After the partnerships are formed, ensure all agreements are in place before launching the marketing advertisements. Finally, re-evaluate your campaign to ensure you’re constantly getting the most value from it. Ensure the companies you partnered with don’t change their goals or branding values without your knowledge.

Adapt to evolving organizational needs

Your collaborative marketing campaigns thrive when internal audits of collaborative relationships are routine. The needs of your organization are dynamic and the digital landscape changes constantly. In order to stay relevant and keep the collaborative marketing campaigns prosperous, regularly reassess both your organization’s needs and changes to the relationships with externals. Ensuring the relationship is still viable and beneficial to your organization will garner success.

Advantages of Collaboration

Better Division of Labor

One of the advantages of collaborative efforts in the workplace is the way that the work is divided. When more than one person is involved in accomplishing a certain task, particularly when it is a large project, it helps for everyone to have a small portion of the responsibility to ensure things get done versus loading one or two people with too much work to accomplish the task.

Greater Creative Input

When you have different people collaborating on a project, then you get a greater sense of creative input. You are able to tap into the creative combination of several employees in one group. The collection of different ideas, approaches to the project and brainstorms can spur innovative results that can in turn raise the visibility and quality of the products or services offered by your company.

Increased Employee Morale

Having employees collaborate also has a positive effect on their morale. As employees work together to accomplish goals, they can celebrate their successes both individually and as a group, and this can cause them to have a more positive view of their jobs and team members. In turn, this can also build trust among co-workers as each member contributes to the team’s accomplishments.

Drawbacks of Collaboration

Lack of Trust Among Team Members

To work effectively, employees on a team need to trust each other. Forbes notes that trust can quickly erode if a single team member doesn’t pull their weight. Because the work is collaborative, an employee who misses deadlines or doesn’t complete their assigned work can negatively impact the work of the entire team. This can lead to frustration and lack of trust within the other employees, reducing the effectiveness of their work and creating tension in the workplace.

Conflicts in Working Styles

When you group different people together to collaborate on one project or set of responsibilities, there may be a conflict in the working styles of the individuals within the group. This is one of the negative aspects of collaboration because it can hold up progress on accomplishing the job at hand, while team members instead muddle through conflicts caused by the different ways team members approach the work.

Too Many Faux Leaders

When you have a collaborative group, you may sometimes end up with too many people trying to lead the group, and not enough members that are willing to take a backseat and just do what it takes to get the job done. This ill will can then bleed over into other areas of the work environment, causing more tension among the rest of the staff, including those that may not even be involved in the collaborative effort.