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A Critical Step in the Brand Licensing Process

Pete Canalichio defines what activities need to take place to ensure the manufacturer (licensee) finds success with their brand licensing agreement. This video illustrates Step 8 of the Brand Licensing Process [Grooming Perennial Champions – Segment 2]. 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’ll recall in video number six, Hugh Simpson and I talked about grooming perennial champions. The first part of that grooming process is orientation. I just talked about that a day or so ago, now we’ll talk about business planning. Once you know the team players on both sides, both the manufacturer and the brand owner, now you want to talk about how you set yourself up for long term success, and that involves business planning. So business planning within a company is not very different than business planning when you talk about a brand owner and a manufacturer. The only thing different is the manufacturer is not part of your company, but all the processes and all the procedures are very similar. So the brand owner wants to understand the licensees’s business plans, and he wants to ensure the alignment with their own business objectives. From the manufacturer’s side, they want to make sure they’re aligning themselves with the overall business objectives of the licensor and that this particular license is going to reinforce and strengthen their own current business model. So specifically, there’s the following areas that are going to be important to go through. Sales management, so how does that take place on an annual business planning process, what happens on a quarterly business process, and then what happens on a monthly process. Then you’ll look at marketing management–so overall what kind of marketing activities are going to take place by the licensee over the next calendar year, and what is important for the licensor to sign off on, especially if there’s specific funds that are set aside in the agreement by the licensor in the agreement. And finally, we want to look at quality control and compliance management–this is pretty much ongoing. So any chance there is to look at the product, make sure it’s tested properly, make sure the facilities are up and running properly and that there’s no audit concerns, then you know that you have a proper business planning process in place. Specifically once the plan is written, then the manufacturer wants to get together with the licensor on a monthly basis and review the plan against what their actual results are. And if they’ve exceeded those results, and they’ll know that things are probably going well. If they haven’t, they can identify problems. We’ve now completed all the steps of the brand licensing process, and I’m excited to be sharing this with you and looking forward to getting you the real brand licensing program.