What does your choice of partners say about your brand?

Remember when you were in grade school and your parents or teachers said, “You’re known by the company you keep”? Did it make you look around at your friends and wonder what being friends with them said about you (and vice versa)? What about today in your business?

What do the partners that you choose say about you, your business and your brand? How is that part of your brand story?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I develop a new partner page for Communication Strategy Group’s website. I want to strengthen recognition for our agency’s ability to orchestrate large marketing projects for clients through our partnerships with other agencies. Some larger agencies have an “in-house” approach to advertising, website design, identity creation, video and events. We take a more focused approach on content and instead work with agency partners who are specialists in these areas.

But making these selections, and showing how we work together, is tougher than it sounds. Showing that theses companies are more than simply a collection of logos displayed on a web page (like you’ll see at most sites) — that they are true partners that bring special skill sets to a challenge — is itself a challenge.

Here’s what I’m trying to decide:

1. What services do we recommend to partners?
2. What are the specific strengths of each partner and how do they pair up with the first question?
3. Should there be only a single partner for each type of service?
4. How, exactly, do these partners extend our Brandtelling approach?
5. What does the choice of partners say about our agency?

If you think through these questions for your own business, you’ll see the types of things that I am pondering now. For example, we frequently partner with designers, but can we (or they) articulate how we work together?

One of these partners, David Loewy at Loewy Design, has done a terrific job detailing the value we add in a LinkedIn recommendation he created. Another partner, Mark Kolier at CGSM (who I know actually reads these posts, Hi Mark!), is a good sounding board for our digital and direct marketing efforts. How can I best leverage David’s quote and capture the value that Mark provides in partner blurbs on our site?

As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, it’s all about TRUST. Who do you trust and who trusts you? And what does that chain of trust mean for your customers and partners?