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Licensing is the Marketeer’s ultimate fantasy – a too-good-to-be-true, budget-generating marketing campaign that extends the brand into new categories. As they might say in America:

Licensing: What’s not to like?

As the Marketing Director of a powerful brand with a sizeable advertising budget, you present your Commercial Director with a strategic licensing proposition including a selection of companies proposing to pay hard cash for the right to increase your brand’s profile. Despite his first thought - ‘what’s the catch?’ – you somehow manage to convince him to let you develop a licensing programme. There’s no shortage of potential partners to work with on exciting collaborations and the products you develop are bought in serious quantities by your passionate consumers. With success, bigger and bigger manufacturers make increasingly exciting offers to create better and better products. Fast forward several years, however, and the enthusiasm for licensing seems to have waned somewhat and you’re considering your career options. So where did it all go wrong?

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