Corporate barter can, in addition to cleaning out non-profitable products that can put a drain on your company’s cash flow, also help expand your marketing efforts.

Normally, one’s ad budget has to focus on primary core consumers, but stretching to reach potential consumers is where corporate barter can be effective by serving as the basis for creating promotions that boost the brand beyond traditional advertising media.

It’s accomplished by setting up a marketing insurance program between a manufacturer and a corporate barter company, with the objective of selling some product beyond what the company expects to sell.

With a proviso, that should conditions change and the additional product (sold to the corporate barter company) be needed, the manufacturer could buy it back at a favorable price. Such strategy is especially useful when launching new products or line extensions, because even million-dollar research studies can’t guarantee consumer acceptance.

Another great way to foster brand identity, while maintaining the integrity of the core brand, is incentives. The company that gives incentives to its sales people is conferring value and gaining more brand exposure. And the corporation bartering the incentive merchandise gets valuable trade credits.

Corporations which don’t do much advertising can benefit from a corporate barter vendor-trading program. It allows a company to utilize accrued trade credits to help pay trusted vendors for such things as packaging, raw materials and printing.

Extending exposure to geographic areas and market segments not currently penetrated, such as overseas distribution, is attainable through corporate barter without incurring the cost of additional staff and marketing support.

And, more and more, excess production capacity can be utilized to make private label products. Thus more income is derived to support the core brands, without causing image erosion.

Overall, corporate barter offers bottomline value while helping maintain brand image and worth—vital assets in the marketplace.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Marketing, Purchasing & Financing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.