Co-marketing
The lightest partnership structure in Europe — no new entity, no shared balance sheet — and the one most companies get wrong on the split and the data.
What co-marketing actually is
Co-marketing is when two independent companies jointly promote each other's existing products or services to each other's audiences, under a contract that creates no new company and no shared balance sheet. That's the whole definition — nothing is merged, nothing is jointly owned, and either side can walk away when the campaign ends.
That makes it the lightest of the five structures covered in partnerships: lighter than a strategic alliance, which is usually multi-year and governed by a steering committee, and a different thing entirely from a joint venture, which creates a jointly owned legal entity. Co-marketing is also frequently confused with co-branding, which it isn't: co-branding merges two brand identities into one new product — think a car maker and a fashion house releasing a jointly badged limited edition — while co-marketing simply promotes what each side already sells. Co-branding is expensive, slow and hard to unwind because it produces a shared asset; co-marketing is fast to set up and just as fast to end, because it doesn't.
This guide covers the formats companies actually use, how to find and vet a partner, how to split the work, cost and leads, and what GDPR requires when a campaign involves sharing an audience. For the step-by-step setup, see co-marketing that works: a five-step setup; for named 2026 examples, see co-marketing examples worth copying.
| Format | Effort | Cost split | Lead ownership | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Co-branded content (guide, report, video) | Low-moderate — days to a few weeks | Roughly 50/50 on production; each side covers its own distribution | Each side keeps the leads it captures on its own forms | Building credibility with a shared audience segment |
| Joint webinar | Moderate — 2–4 weeks lead time | Split evenly, or by who supplies the platform and speakers | Shared registrant list by agreement — full list to both, or the hosting side keeps first touch | Top-of-funnel demand generation between complementary products |
| Bundle or joint offer | Moderate-high — needs commercial and legal sign-off | Proportional to the value or margin each side gives up | Whoever processes the transaction owns the customer relationship | Cross-selling between products with a genuine, non-competing overlap |
| Joint event or store-in-store | High — weeks to months, real budget | Negotiated per deal, often by floor space or expected footfall | Rarely shared — each party tracks its own attendance and sales | Reaching a physical or highly engaged audience the other side already owns |
| Co-branded social or influencer campaign | Low-moderate | Media spend split by an agreed ratio; content production shared | Reach and attention, not leads — no data changes hands | Awareness and brand association rather than pipeline |
Effort and cost-split patterns are typical ranges based on how these formats are usually run in Europe, not fixed rules — real deals negotiate the split case by case.
How to find and vet a partner
The right co-marketing partner shares your audience without competing for the same purchase decision — a project management tool and an invoicing tool both sell to small-business owners but solve different problems, which is a genuine overlap; two invoicing tools selling to the same buyer are competitors wearing a partnership badge.
Audience overlap, not audience identity
Check this with real data before the first call: LinkedIn's Campaign Manager, a shared newsletter's subscriber overlap, or simply asking the other side for their customer profile. A partner whose audience only partially overlaps with yours is usually more valuable than one whose audience is identical, because identical audiences mean you're both fighting for the same attention rather than expanding into new attention.
Brand and quality fit
A co-marketing campaign puts your name next to theirs in front of your own customers. Check recent reviews, recent press, and how the other company has handled a public misstep, if it's had one — a partner's reputation becomes partly yours for the length of the campaign.
A reference check on past partnerships
Ask for one company they've co-marketed with before, and ask that company how the split actually worked in practice versus what was agreed on paper. This single question surfaces more about a prospective partner's reliability than anything in a pitch deck.
The full process, including outreach templates and what to put in the first call, is in how to find the right co-marketing partner.
Splitting the work, cost and leads
Most co-marketing deals fail on the split, not the idea. Agree on three things in writing before either side spends a euro or shares a contact.
Who does the work: content production, design, platform hosting and promotion each need a named owner, even when the cost is split evenly — an even cost split with no clear owner for each task is how deadlines slip. Attribution: use campaign-specific UTM parameters and a shared tracking sheet from day one, or neither side will be able to prove the campaign worked when it's time to decide whether to repeat it. And lead ownership: decide before launch whether registrants or bundle customers belong to whichever side captured them, get shared in full to both parties, or get split by an agreed rule (first-touch, source channel, or a simple 50/50 of the total list) — and put that rule in the contract, not in a follow-up email once the numbers are in and one side likes them more than the other.
The five-step version of this, with a sample split agreement, is in co-marketing that works: a five-step setup.
GDPR when you share an audience
Sharing a lead list or a registrant list with a co-marketing partner is a data-protection decision, not just a commercial one, and getting the controller status wrong is the most common compliance mistake in co-marketing.
Joint controller or two independent controllers
Under the EU's Guidelines 07/2020 on the concepts of controller and processor, two companies that jointly decide the purpose and means of processing — for example, planning a webinar together and agreeing to use the combined registrant data for both companies' follow-up marketing — are joint controllers under GDPR Article 26. That's a different, stricter status than two companies that simply run separate campaigns and each collect their own opt-ins independently, which is the more common and much simpler setup: each brand runs its own registration form, keeps its own list, and the two lists are never merged.
What Article 26 actually requires
If a campaign does make two companies joint controllers, Article 26 requires a transparent arrangement — it doesn't have to be a single formal contract, but it does have to set out, in a way available to data subjects, who does what: which side handles access and erasure requests, which side provides the privacy notice at the point of collection, and who's the first point of contact if something goes wrong. The EDPB's guidance is explicit that this arrangement should exist before processing starts, not be reconstructed after a data subject complains.
The lead-sharing setup that avoids the problem
Most European co-marketing campaigns sidestep joint controllership entirely by design: each brand collects its own opt-in on its own form, with its own named consent for its own follow-up marketing, and the only thing that's shared is aggregate campaign performance — total registrants, attendance rate, conversion rate — not the underlying personal data. That structure keeps both sides as independent controllers, each responsible only for its own list, which is simpler to run and easier to explain to a data-protection officer than a genuinely joint one.
Agree the lead-split rule and the controller status before the campaign launches — both get much harder to negotiate once one side is looking at a list it likes.
Co-marketing worth studying in 2026
Spotify and the leather-goods brand Coach announced a global co-marketing partnership in June 2026 at the Cannes Lions Festival, built around music and fashion rather than a media buy or logo placement — Spotify supplies cultural reach with a younger audience, Coach supplies a fashion audience, and neither side is selling the other's product; it's pure audience-sharing through co-branded content and experiential activations.
Too Good To Go, the European surplus-food app, runs an ongoing co-marketing relationship with UK bakery chain Greggs, named by consumers as the app's most popular brand partner according to trade press coverage — a straightforward audience-and-distribution fit between an app that needs supply and a retailer that needs a route to food-waste-conscious customers.
On the B2B side, HubSpot's EMEA Partner Summit in June 2026 highlighted the same underlying pattern at platform scale: Platinum-tier solutions partners get ready-made co-marketing kits — white-labelled campaign assets and content — specifically so two partner companies, or a partner and HubSpot itself, can run joint campaigns without building the collateral from zero each time.
More examples, with what specifically made each one work and what to copy for a smaller budget, are in co-marketing examples worth copying.
Where co-marketing sits next to the rest of the partnership stack
A co-marketing campaign is often the first step toward a deeper relationship, not the end point. A joint webinar that keeps working quarter after quarter is a candidate for a strategic alliance with formal governance behind it; a bundle that depends on the two products actually talking to each other technically needs a technology integration to hold up past the first campaign. For the full comparison across all five structures European companies use, from a single campaign to a fully merged company, see partnerships.
Is co-marketing the same as co-branding?
No. Co-marketing is two companies promoting each other's existing products to each other's audiences, with no new product created. Co-branding merges two brand identities into a single new product or service, which is a bigger, slower and harder-to-unwind commitment.
Do we need a data processing agreement to run a joint webinar with a partner?
It depends on the setup. If each company collects its own opt-in and keeps its own list, both sides are independent controllers and a standard data processing agreement usually isn't the right document. If the two companies jointly decide to merge and use a combined registrant list, they're likely joint controllers under GDPR Article 26 and need a transparent arrangement covering data subject rights and responsibilities — not a processor contract.
How should we split leads from a co-marketing campaign fairly?
Agree the rule before launch, not after the numbers come in: common approaches are each side keeping the leads it captured on its own form, sharing the full list by mutual agreement, or splitting by an objective rule such as source channel or a straight percentage. Put the rule in the contract so neither side is negotiating it once one list looks better than the other.
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