After You Sign Your Brand Licensing Agreement

Pete Canalichio describes what takes place after the licensing agreement is signed and who is involved. This video illustrates Step 7 of Pete’s 8-Step Brand Licensing Process. [Grooming Perennial Champions – Segment 1]. You can view more of my videos on the Brand Licensing Process on my YouTube channel or on my videos page.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Pete Canalichio, and welcome to the brand licensing pre-launch. You may recall in video number six, Hugh Simpson and I talked about grooming perennial champions. Well now that you’ve had your contract signed, you’re really ready to get started, and you want to make sure that the success starts off on a great foot and continues year after year. In order to do that, the first part–the most important part–is getting proper orientation. Now I always talk about that orientation starting when you first meet the prospective licensee–or in this case, if you’re the manufacturer, the prospective licensor–but it really comes down to a full-blown orientation session that should take place right after the contract is signed. Usually this takes place at the manufacturer’s facilities, because then the brand owner can actually see what’s going on by the manufacturer and get a full sense of exactly how they go to market with their product. So who should be attending that meeting? Well it’s everyone! From the brand owner’s side, that’s going to be interacting with the manufacturer. So that can include the business unit, the marketing department, the licensing department, but it also can be research and development and potentially even operations or sales. If they’re going to be involved from the manufacturer’s side, we’re looking at product development, we’re looking at the marketing folks, the sales folks, and really the whole leadership team, because if this is a big brand, and this is a relatively mid-sized company or even a smaller company, then this is going to be an important strategic component of their long-term growth. So you want to make sure that everyone in that manufacturing group understands the obligations and requirements of the contract. So once they’re together, then you can talk about things like contract terms and business implications, specifically how the brand should be treated and what the category strategy will be, what brand guidelines are required and how do they get a proved, and remember we talked a little bit about the approval process before. And so that’s the next piece. How many stages of approval are there? What are the timelines for required approvals? Finally, what’s going on as it relates to testing of that product once it’s approved and any auditing provisions that are allowed by the brand owner to make sure that the manufacturer is doing things correctly. So this is the first step getting the orientation right. I look forward to coming back to you and talking about business planning.