[email protected]
0333 050 1245

Co-Branding Guidelines: How to Set Rules Both Brands Can Follow

  1. Home
  2. »
  3. Blog
  4. »
  5. Co-Branding Guidelines: How to Set Rules Both Brands Can Follow

Co-branding guidelines are a short, agreed set of rules for how two brands appear together: who leads, how the logos sit side by side, which colours and wording are allowed, who signs off the artwork and what the contract says if the partnership ends. Write them before the first piece of artwork is made, and both partners will spend far less time arguing over proofs.

This guide is for UK business owners who are about to team up with another company, sponsor an event or be sponsored. It covers what to put in the rules, how to place logos, which mistakes to avoid and what good partnerships look like.

Kukoocreative
Make Your Brand Partnership Clear
Kukoocreative creates logos and websites that build brand recognition, helping business owners present their identity clearly alongside a partner.

Visit Kukoocreative

TL;DR

  • Agree a lead (“host”) and a supporting (“guest”) brand, or declare the partners equal, before any design work starts.
  • For equal partners, make logos optically equal in size and prominence, side by side, with clear space around each.
  • Use one approval route with named owners on each side, and put usage limits and termination terms in writing.
  • Never let a partner logo mislead customers about who is actually selling to them.
  • Build a one-page partner pack: logo files, clear space, colours, approved wording and contacts.

Table of Contents

What co-branding is, and when it makes sense

Co-branding is a strategic alliance in which two or more brands partner to create a product or service marketed under both names. The aim is usually more awareness, access to a new audience or a stronger brand image.

It helps to separate it from a close cousin. Rocket Lawyer UK distinguishes the two: co-branding uses multiple brand names to develop a good or service, while co-marketing promotes each partner’s separate offering together. Your guidelines will differ slightly depending on which you are doing. A co-branded product needs rules for packaging and naming. A co-marketing campaign needs rules for adverts, emails and social posts.

The partnership can be short or long. The Chartered Institute of Marketing notes that collaborations may be short-term campaigns or events, or long-term partnerships, and that they can lift awareness, credibility and the reach of pooled marketing budgets. BigCommerce UK lists sensible use cases: filling a capability gap, funding a project jointly, helping a specialist gain exposure, entering a partner’s customer market and sponsorship.

For a small business, the typical situations are simple:

  • A local manufacturer and a retailer launching a joint range.
  • A sponsor’s logo on an event poster, website or kit.
  • Two service firms running a joint webinar or guide.
  • A supplier badge on your website (“Proud partner of…”).

Each of these puts your logo next to someone else’s. The question is who decides how.

What co-branding guidelines should include

Good guidelines are not long. Large organisations publish pages of rules, but the structure transfers well to a business of any size. Pulling together the published approaches of several brands, these are the parts worth covering.

Roles: host and guest

GE HealthCare’s published co-branding guidelines say to define “host” and “guest” roles and to assess each initiative for strategic intent and risk, so brand equity is protected from inconsistent or adverse associations. For you, that means answering one question up front: whose campaign is this? The host’s brand rules take priority. The guest follows them. If neither leads, write “equal partners” and apply the equal-partner rules below.

The shared style system

The Pedowitz Group recommends a joint style system covering logos, colours and legal lines, alongside a shared brief and a clear way to attribute results. In practice, your partner pack should hold:

  • Approved logo files (full colour, single colour, reversed) and which version goes on which background.
  • Clear space and minimum sizes for each logo.
  • Brand colours and typefaces for any joint material, and which brand’s palette leads.
  • Approved wording, such as “in partnership with”, plus any legal lines or trademark notices.
  • Contact names for questions.

If your own brand guidelines are not yet written, start there. Our guide to why you need brand guidelines explains what belongs in them, and the complete brand guideline guide walks through the structure. A partner cannot follow rules you have not written down.

Approval workflow

Pedowitz Group also suggests assigning one content owner and one brand or legal owner per side, with content approved before brand and legal, so reviewers do not issue conflicting changes at the same time. For a small firm, “owner” may mean you and one colleague. Name them anyway, set a turnaround time, and agree that silence is not approval.

Co-brand approval workflow from content to sign-off

EVO Payments, which publishes UK partner rules, goes further and states that partners must obtain approval before using communications that include its certified-partner logo or payment network logos. Pre-approval of anything public is a sound default for any partnership.

The GE HealthCare guidance also points to trademark use, legal agreements and contractual safeguards such as termination clauses and usage limitations. Your guidelines are not a contract, but they should sit alongside one. Cover at least:

  • Who owns the new artwork, name or product created together.
  • How long each partner may use the other’s logo, and what happens to printed stock when the deal ends.
  • How either side can end the arrangement and how fast logos must come down.
  • Who is responsible for claims made in joint advertising.

For a significant partnership, have a solicitor review the agreement. The law firm Foot Anstey names authenticity, reputation, communication and fairness as core considerations when businesses enter a brand partnership, which makes a useful checklist for the conversation before you sign.

Logo placement: the rules that cause the most arguments

Most disputes are about logos, because size and position signal importance. Settle it in writing, using one of the two models below.

Equal partners

The University of Stirling’s brand guidance says equal partners’ logos should be optically equal in size, equally prominent, side by side and separated by clear space. “Optically” matters. A square badge and a long wordmark set at the same width will not look equal, so adjust until they carry the same visual weight.

Meta’s UK brand guidance for partners adds three practical points: scale logos equally, preserve clear space and legibility, and avoid mixing a full logo for one brand with only a symbol for the other. Mismatched versions are a very common reason a lock-up looks amateur.

Order is the next question. Airbus’s joint branding guidance notes that in horizontal arrangements one logo is often placed to the left of the partner logo, while in vertical stacking the lead brand can take the upper position. Choose a rule that does not feel like a ranking: alphabetical order is a neutral option, or the order in which the partnership was announced.

If you need a dividing line between logos, keep it thin and use the same space on both sides.

Lead and supporting brands

When one brand clearly leads, the other steps back. Virgin Atlantic’s partner-led guidelines describe the supporting logo being reduced in size, placed in a specific corner or anchored on a white panel at the base, sometimes with an “In partnership with” line. That is a sensible pattern for a sponsor credit, a stockist badge or a supplier mark.

A few instructions to put in your own rules:

  1. State the maximum and minimum logo height for the supporting brand, as a proportion of the lead logo.
  2. Fix the position (for example bottom right of a poster, footer of a web page).
  3. Say which colour version is allowed on photos and dark backgrounds.
  4. Say whether a descriptor line is required.

Sponsor logo placement is where the equal-or-lead decision becomes concrete. The BBC’s guidelines for third-party broadcasters, for example, require that the BBC credit’s size, type and duration are identical to and no less prominent than the credit given to any other company receiving a text presentation credit. The principle is worth borrowing: sponsors on the same tier get the same treatment, and a higher tier gets a clearly larger or earlier slot.

A simple sponsor-wall rule set might read:

Tier Logo size Position Wording
Headline partner Largest, set by you Top row or first position “Headline partner” or “In partnership with”
Supporting sponsors One size, all equal Row beneath, same clear space “Supported by”
Suppliers and friends Smallest, all equal Footer strip “With thanks to”

Lockups of several marks should also keep a fixed order. The Royal Navy Museums’ 2026 brand guidelines, for example, say the three institutions’ logos should always appear together as a lineup, with Portsmouth Historic Dockyard leading. Decide your lineup once and supply it as a single artwork file so nobody rebuilds it.

Mistakes that weaken a partnership

Letting one side redraw the other’s logo. Supply approved files and ban stretching, recolouring or cropping. Your guidelines should say who can ask for a variation and how.

Mixing logo versions. As Meta’s guidance warns, a full logo for one brand beside only a symbol for the other reads as unequal. Match like with like.

Crowding. Without clear space, two logos merge into one confusing shape. Set an exclusion zone and keep to it.

Blurring who is selling. The UK Advertising Standards Authority warns that prominent brand names or logos must not make the advertiser’s identity ambiguous or misleading, and that another brand’s logo must not mislead consumers or take unfair advantage of a trademark. If customers could believe the partner is the supplier, or that you are endorsed when you are not, change the layout or the wording.

Too many partners on one message. Meta’s guidance generally shows no more than one of its technologies or programmes alongside one partner brand. Keep joint material focused on one pairing at a time.

Unclear exits. Printed leaflets, signage and website badges outlive a partnership unless the agreement sets a take-down period.

Mistakes that weaken a partnership

Co-branding examples worth learning from

Well-known partnerships show what the guidelines are protecting.

GoPro and Red Bull. The pairing works because of a shared use case: GoPro cameras capture Red Bull’s sports events from the athlete’s point of view. According to Shopify’s roundup, in November 2025 GoPro captured Red Bull Rampage for the third consecutive year as exclusive action camera partner. Lesson: pick a partner whose audience and purpose naturally overlap with yours, and show the partnership in the work itself, not only in a logo.

A university equal-partner lockup. Stirling’s guidance shows how formal bodies treat parity: same visual weight, side by side, protected space. Lesson: equality is a design decision you can specify.

An airline and its partners. Virgin Atlantic’s partner-led rules show the supporting role in action, with a smaller logo and an “In partnership with” line. Lesson: a clear hierarchy avoids debate on every new asset.

A public broadcaster’s credit rules. The BBC’s requirement of identical size and duration for equal credits shows how fairness can be written as a measurable rule.

For a small business, the same logic scales down. A Leeds café selling a coffee roaster’s beans, for instance, might use a “Coffee by…” line with the roaster’s logo at a fixed small height in the corner of the menu. Nothing complicated, but written down so every new menu follows it.

Our perspective

We design logos and brand identities for small and growing businesses, and co-branding is where weak identity work shows up fastest. A logo that only works on a white page, in one colour version, at one size, falls apart when it sits beside another brand’s mark.

That is why we build identities to flex: a primary logo, a compact version, single-colour and reversed files, and clear-space rules that hold up in a lockup. With those in place, writing co-branding rules takes an afternoon instead of a month of back and forth.

Our process is collaborative and we offer unlimited revisions on branding work, so if a partnership needs a new lockup or a supporting-brand version, we can iterate with you until it sits right. Start with your own guidelines, then extend them to partners.

Kukoo

Build your partner pack in six steps

  1. Define the relationship. Product co-brand, co-marketing campaign or sponsorship? Name the host and guest, or declare equal partners.
  2. Set the aims. Write down the audience, the goal and what a good result looks like for each side.
  3. Gather the assets. Collect logo files, colours, fonts and approved wording from both brands. If your own set is incomplete, fix that first with our branding consistency workflow.
  4. Draw the lockup. Create one approved artwork for each context: horizontal, stacked and single-colour.
  5. Name the approvers. One content owner and one brand or legal owner per side, with a turnaround time.
  6. Sign the safeguards. Usage limits, ownership of joint work, termination and take-down periods go in the agreement.

Then review after the first campaign. Check printed proofs, web layouts and social images against the pack, and update the rules where reality exposed a gap.

Get your own identity partner-ready

Co-branding is much easier when your own brand is already consistent and flexible. If your logo, colours and file set are not yet ready to sit beside another brand, we can help. Our logo design and visual identity packages start with a polish at £150, a logo only at £440 or a full Visual Identity at £750, all one-off prices. If you are not sure which fits, see our full list of design services or tell us about your partnership and we will point you to the right starting place.

Kukoocreative

If you are comparing studios, our note on choosing a branding agency lists what to ask before you commit.

FAQ

What is the difference between co-branding and sponsorship?

Co-branding usually means two brands create or market something together under both names. Sponsorship is often a one-way support arrangement where the sponsor’s logo appears on someone else’s event, product or channel. Sponsorship is one of the use cases BigCommerce UK lists for brand partnerships, and it follows the same placement logic: agree the hierarchy, then specify sizes and positions.

Should both logos always be the same size?

Only when the partners are equal. In that case they should be optically equal, which can mean different measured widths for different shapes. When one brand leads, the supporting logo is typically smaller and sits in a set position, as in Virgin Atlantic’s partner-led rules.

Who should approve co-branded material?

Name one content approver and one brand or legal approver on each side, and agree an order. Content is checked first, then brand and legal, so changes do not collide. Put a turnaround time in the agreement.

Yes, for anything beyond a one-off credit. Guidelines explain how logos look. The agreement covers trademark use, ownership of joint work, usage limits and termination. For a substantial deal, take advice from a solicitor.

Can I put a partner’s logo on my website without asking?

Ask first. Many brands publish rules that require approval before their logo is used in communications, as EVO Payments does for its partner logos. Using a logo in a way that suggests an endorsement you do not have can also breach advertising rules, according to the ASA.

Sources