Promotional Tie-Ins

Promotional tie-ins are a form of marketing promotion in which two or more brands or companies agree to participate in a joint strategy to increase value for both brands regarding exposure or sales, while providing each partner with targeted communication efforts that many times exceed the opportunities provided via traditional advertising alone. Many companies use this as a special form of advertising and marketing to reach the important target audience of children and teenagers, who have become an increasingly powerful consumer segment.

Strategies aimed toward these younger audiences typically involve identifying the most popular characters from children's movies, TV shows, books, and video games and attempting to maximize this popularity via the successful co-merchandising of products that bear the names or images of the characters. This usually occurs as a partnership between an entertainment company and another type of company, which supplies either character-themed merchandise or an entertainment item itself (e.g., a DVD or video game) as a premium to customers who buy its products. Thus, the entertainment company gets the benefit of increased exposure, “hype,” or sales, while the co-promoting company gets the benefit of enhanced exposure and an increase in both volume and sales of its own products. Product licensing and promotional tie-ins account for a business that is well over $100 million annually. For example, since the first Star Wars movie in 1977, the six films under the name have generated almost $9 billion in merchandise sales and product promotions.

One familiar promotional strategy relating to children typically involves giving away characterthemed merchandise (e.g., a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure) with the purchase of children's meals at a particular fast-food restaurant. The vast range of premium character-themed merchandise goes far beyond just action figures and includes all sorts of specialty products such as hats, T-shirts, watches, posters, cups and glasses, lunch boxes, and sometimes even discounts to the movie being promoted. The implementation of such promotional strategies geared toward children, quite commonplace today, is not a new occurrence in the world of entertainment and marketing. Indeed, the drastic increase in sales of raccoontail hats and other similar items propelled by Disney's Davy Crockett TV shows in the 1950s remains one of the most successful promotional tie-in efforts ever.

Because of its prevalence in marketing toward children and adolescents, the fast-food industry typically is the most visible or best-known co-developer of these promotions. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Domino's, and Little Caesar's all have pursued promotional tie-ins for movies such as Star Wars, The Flintstones, Rugrats, Ghostbusters, The Lion King, Spider Man, Batman Returns, and so on, as well as for some items somewhat less obvious to adults, such as Nintendo or Sega video games and the Scholastic Goosebumps mystery book. Major players on the entertainment side generally include the major motion picture and TV studios, children's programming companies such as Sesame Workshop or Nickelodeon, and the many other companies involved in producing non-TV and non-movie entertainment for children (e.g., video games, books, music).

However, many promotional tie-in marketing strategies extend beyond simply partnering with a fast-food chain. Packaged food and beverage companies that market to children certainly have shown their interest in this strategy as well, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Hershey, Frito-Lay, Kellogg's, and Quaker. The use of the promotional tie-in strategy commonly may go beyond the realm of products geared toward children, as some companies have seen the value of trying to reach the parents of the intended younger target. For example, in a promotional effort that included several children's food products, Walt Disney Pictures' Aladdin also partnered with CPC International to include the sale of Hellmann's mayonnaise and Mazola corn oil in the promotion and worked communications company AT&T into the mix. Furthermore, other partnerships have included promotional tie-ins with hotel chains and theme parks/recreation areas.

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