06/30/2008

Brand Sense Helps Companies Diversify During Economic Downturn

Unless your head is firmly buried in the sand it is difficult to avoid the reality that the economy is weak and that the prospects for major corporations are bleaker than they have been in recent memory. While brand licensing can provide supplementary cash flow to companies looking for growth, the ultimate reliance on a good retail environment means that this is a blunt tool at best in alleviating the pressures companies are facing. At least one licensing agency, however, sees opportunity where most see challenges. Brand Sense Partners (“BSP”), the Los Angeles-based brand extension firm that represents the likes of Electronic Arts, Armor All, Kingsford, and Hamilton Beach believes that it can uniquely provide real, tangible value to its corporate clients especially in a bearish economy. With the realities of the marketplace in mind, BSP has added two significant new service offerings to its industry leading licensing and brand extension services to help better meet the needs of companies facing a difficult market environment.

The first area of focus is new business development consulting, a service in which BSP identifies underleveraged corporate assets and develops business plans for monetizing them. BSP has put together a group of dedicated consulting professionals who conduct a thorough corporate asset audit to determine where there are underleveraged pockets of value that can be repurposed into new businesses. Such assets include brand, retailer relationships, R&D capabilities, media spend, and all the other unique and valuable capabilities that are developed in executing the core business but that may also have significant value to external partners launching new businesses. BSP’s business development professionals then deliver practical and executable business plans that create the roadmap for unlocking the value of such assets. “Brand Sense already leads the way in developing formal and strategic licensing business plans as part of our brand extension agency business,” said Ramez Toubassy, president of BSP. “When existing and new clients started asking us to apply this same disciplined approach to examining their non-brand assets we saw a major opportunity for growing our business and theirs.” According to Toubassy consulting clients will typically utilize their existing in-house infrastructure to execute on these plans as opposed to taking advantage of BSP’s turn-key infrastructure. The new consulting practice has already been engaged by several of BSP’s existing clients as well as by a major TV network looking for non-core revenue growth.

BSP has also established a new partnership development group that is exclusively focused on identifying and developing marketing and business development alliances on behalf of its clients. In an environment where marketing budgets are being slashed, creatively designed partnerships and alliances are becoming a more critical tool in getting a company’s marketing message to consumers. “While these types of alliance may not generate royalty revenues for brand owners, the general structure and management of them does not look that different from the hundreds of licensing partnerships we manage on behalf of our clients,” Toubassy said. “The value to the brand , real consumer engagement, is something money cannot buy and in many cases trumps licensing as a strategic imperative. By bringing our unique viewpoint to identifying and executing marketing partnerships on behalf of our clients we are solving a major issue corporations are facing today and are making BSP more relevant across the client’s organization.” BSP recently announced that it will be providing partnership development services to leading women’s health and fitness publication Shape Magazine and Toubassy indicated that several more signings were in the offing.

These two new practice areas are just a first step in the continuing expansion of BSP’s business model beyond traditional licensing. According to Toubassy, BSP is laser focused on finding new and innovative ways to use its infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of companies feeling the heat from the sharp global market downturn.

About Brand Sense Partners, LLC

Established in 2001, Brand Sense Partners, LLC (BSP) is a strategic new business development consultancy with an integrated turnkey infrastructure designed to execute the firm’s recommendations. BSP fosters growth in new categories of business for its clients by leveraging brand equity and other strategic assets. Clients focus on their core businesses while BSP’s team of industry experts develops the strategy through market research and in-depth analysis, negotiates the deals and manages the new lines of business. The BSP approach reduces capital costs, risk and time to market resulting in new, profitable and accelerated growth for its clients. Headquartered in Los Angeles, BSP manages more than 200 partnerships for its Fortune 500 clients with approximately $1.5 Billion in retail sales in the consumer products, media, and technology, celebrity and fashion industries. For more information, please visit www.bsp.com.