Study On Collaborative Elements Of Ingredient Co-Branding

As a special form of brand alliance,Ingredient Co-branding has become popular recently,and has been widely used in the industry.However,there are some cases showing that not all Ingredient Co-branding can produce positive effect for brands.In fact,potential value of alliance comes from cooperation.Cooperation means the members of alliances will cooperate consciously to achieve their common goals,which is the guarantee of highly integration of the alliance.Aiming at analyzing what Ingredient Co-branding will cooperate on,i.e.the constitution of cooperation elements in Ingredient Co-branding,this thesis includes two parts.First,based on the theory of Business Ecosystem,combined with the research results of collaborative elements from relevant alliances,such as strategic alliances,technology alliances and innovation alliances,this part puts forward the framework of Ingredient Co-branding's collaboration elements including strategic cooperation,organizational collaboration and knowledge collaboration by using concept analysis method and comparative research method.Second,by analyzing the nature of Ingredient Co-branding and the characteristics of related subjects,this part explores the compositions of collaborative elements in the Ingredient Co-branding and shows the key variables and influencing factors to each variable,and then establishes an evolutionary game model by taking knowledge cooperation as an example to discuss the evolution behavior of the main brand and ingredient brand's collaboration strategy.The results show that:(1)the framework of Ingredient Co-branding is a trinity of strategic cooperation,organizational collaboration and knowledge collaboration.The three elements which are mutually conditional and mutually promoting each other have a dialectical and unified relationship.(2)Strategic cooperation of Ingredient Co-branding includes three key variables: culture and values,trust and exchange,interest and risk.Organizational collaboration includes three key variables: structure and process,coordination mechanism and network organization.Knowledge collaboration includes three key variables: hidden explicit knowledge,inter-organizational learning and knowledge interface.The key factors influencing the strategic cooperation include the consistent strategic vision and goals of both parties,the internal cooperation mechanism,the external cooperation mechanism and the ability to deal with the changes of the external environment.The key factors influencing organizational collaboration include the trust of both parties,the overall quality of managers,commitment and effective communication.The key factors influencing knowledge collaboration include resource dependence,knowledge sharing,knowledge transfer coefficient and potential risk.(3)By improving resource dependence and conversion coefficient of alliance enterprises,increasing the sharing of knowledge and reducing the potential risk of knowledge sharing,the chances of choosing knowledge sharing strategy will be greater,the probability of knowledge collaboration toward the direction of(knowledge integration,knowledge input)strategy will be greater,so that alliance enterprises will get more profits.The results of the research will provide some theoretical support for enterprises to do their decision-making on Ingredient Co-branding.