In India, however, it has had a chequered history and the basic reason for that is our general distrust about anything that we believe will help both parties. But the paradigm of this alliance-building is changing for the better: it is helping companies maximise resources and is enabling them to build value across the consumer spectrum.

Send your comments to the columnist Name Your E-Mail Your Comments

I have always believed that varying companies have varying strengths. Like 3M is great at innovation, Sony is great at taking products to market. Today, the Koreans are teaching invaluable lessons in price optimisation, as are brands like Apple, which are exploding the domains of imagination. But somewhere down the line, all these companies understand the import and the purpose of doing this. It is not for survival alone that they strike alliances: it is also because they intrinsically believe that sometimes one plus one really is 11!

Of late, we have been seeing interesting alliances being forged: take, for instance, this newspaper group: The Indian Express Group put in place an interesting marketing alliance which would help consolidate ad sales and ensure greater revenue maximisation at lower cost of acquisition: imagine if you were to set up independent marketing and sales departments across the country! Such alliances have formed the bedrock of sales alliances even between television channels, such as the one between Discovery and Sony.

There are revenue alliances, which focus on the immediate and may have no long-term impact: such as the one that Star TV has created for KBC 2 between themselves and Airtel. This alliance is not only designed to be revenue-driven but Star will layer a lot of programming innovation: it will help people reach out and call the show in order to participate: it will throw up interesting data which will then have an impact on the understanding of the reach and power of television and such like.

But at the heart of it, what is this alliance? Nothing, except for strategic co-optetiton, something that global brands understood long ago, which is why in Europe you have a long-standing alliance between Nestle and Coca-Cola. I remember many years ago, there was an interesting alliance here between Bata and the then Reckit & Colman when Bata stores used to market Cherry Blossom: now, that made sense since Bata was effectively making the shoe-shopping experience convenient, given the fact that one did not have to hunt in another store for shoe polish.

More recently, I was impressed by the announcement that ONGC and LN Mittal have tied up to explore opportunities. It is this kind of co-optetiton which will pave the way for globalisation of Indian brands (as in the case of ONGC) and the Indianisation of global brands (as in the case of the LN Mittal Group): what is interesting is that for the first time, this kind of co-optetiton has been crafted by a public sector undertaking: and once again, ONGC has established its management credentials by daring to be different. The fact that petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has been supportive of this also indicates how radically he is looking at invigorating the energy business in India. For me, this kind of alliance marks the entry of the concept of co-optetiton into the very development of basic business modules and joint ventures: something that will augur well for Indian business as a whole.

If you look at the impending explosion of the retail scenario in India and what it will do to real estate pricing, co-optetiton will become a business imperative rather than just well-researched management intervention. It is this step that will help define which brands will compete for consumers and at all times, attempting to maximise the experience that consumers get. The importance of this management concept cannot be ignored by companies, big or small: be they ones operating within the domesticmarket or, for that matter, internationally.

The time for this concept to be the strategic bedrock of many corporate moves has come. The sooner we embrace it, the better off we shall all be.

The writer is CEO, Equus Redcell