Alliance Brand

Alliance Brand: Fulfilling the Promise of Partnering is a business book written by Mark Darby and was published in 2006. The book discusses business and organizational alliances and how partnering can offer promise as a strategic business solution. However, up to 70% of partnering initiatives don’t deliver on that promise and the implications of failure can increase. Darby argues that in the age of the extended enterprise, firms must display a positive reputation and hard results from their alliances in order to attract the best partners and stand out from the growing crowd of potential allies.

Concepts

The book introduces the concept of Alliance Brand, which is about having a positive reputation as well as hard results for your partnering activity. It explores three critical success factors for winning with alliances and shows in detail how to apply it in practice.

According to Darby, getting a positive reputation and results (i.e. Alliance Brand) from partnering requires three critical success factors:

1. Having a capability to partner
2. Having the right partners
3. Creating effective relationship architectures for each alliance

The book then introduces a set of tools that can be used by organizations of different shapes and sizes for practical application. This helps them implement the three critical success factors and gain measurable benefits from the way they investigate, create, and execute their partnering and alliance activity.