Most co-operations come to an end at some point. There are different occasions and reasons why. The questions we like to address here are how partnerships should be terminated and what are the risks that need to be taken into consideration?

In some cases, marketing co-operations simply phase out unnoticeably in the course of time without causing a stir. This is often the case, when no new budgets are allocated, the performance has not reached the objectives, the belief in the co-operation’s success is missing or the performance has not been tracked properly, the responsible persons change jobs and the new person in charge focuses on different tasks. In other cases, co-operations terminate all of a sudden. Such situations can have several reasons: The management of one of the co-operating companies has changed and now pursuits a different strategy, the allocated budget is suddenly locked or the partner brand faces severe image problems.

Our experiences have shown that co-operations that slowly phase out in the course of time do require in most cases little management effort and collateral communications to finish off decently. Although this might not always be the most efficient approach and exceptions occur, of course (so for instance when co-operations involved complex business processes, many different business interfaces and high number of customer interactions). The sudden end to co-operations, however, runs the risk of severe brand damage and negative consumer experiences. It requires a solid management of the termination process (to smoothly separate the mutual business activities) and a clear communication strategy (to stop people from speculating, to avoid negative user experiences and wrong expectations).

It is certainly understandable, that generally little effort is being allocated to the termination of something that has no future and thus presents little opportunity to distinguish oneself from others in the working environment. But co-operation managers should always analyse the risk related to an unmanaged co-operation termination: meaning for instance image damage, negative user experiences and speculations in the market. Managing the termination of a co-operation professionally can address these risks.

Before you hop onto the next big project, analyse what is at stake here and see if it is worth running the risks of abandoning the co-operation to its fate or not. In addition, the documentation of key learnings of the co-operation engagement including an overview of the people involved, their responsibilities and a list of future contact persons might also be a sensible thing to do.