There has never been a better time to get together, according to a recent study my firm, Lloyd James Group completed. Marketers are now spending just under a fifth of all marketing budgets on affinity marketing. But what does this mean exactly? Affinity marketing has become the common phrase to describe the growing activity between two brands, where both organizations swap "brand assets," usually access to each others' customers, or the high visibility appeal of their brand or product offering. And, according to the research, the rapid uptake of this form of marketing by major U.K. firms is expected to continue so that by 2007 more than one-quarter of all marketing spend will be allocated to this type of partnership activity.
We asked a sample from the Top 1,000 U.K. companies, across key industry sectors, what share of the marketing budget they currently assign to affinity marketing, and we canvassed views to estimate British marketers' overall commitment to...
