Using Information Networks to Discover and Execute Marketing Brand Alliances: A Data-Driven Framework for Actionable Insights

Marketing brand alliances are consumer-facing collaborations in which brands are jointly presented through shared offerings or campaigns. Yet, despite their widespread use in practice, no existing framework supports their market-wide, ex ante discovery with execution guidance. We address this gap by formalizing brand alliance opportunity discovery as a new computational design problem characterized by two desiderata that prior work has not jointly addressed: signal fusion and actionability. We propose brand alliance network exploitation (BANE), a sociotechnical framework that leverages information networks derived from digital user traces to satisfy these desiderata through four phases: (i) predicting alliance opportunities by integrating off-line brand attributes, online consumer comention signals, and network embeddings; (ii) validating predictions through consumer and brand manager surveys; (iii) qualifying predicted positive, nonmaterialized alliance opportunities for actionability across quadrants; and (iv) generating marketing mix execution guidance. Temporal holdout testing demonstrates that BANE predicts future alliances from preannouncement signals, ablation analysis confirms the incremental value of each signal layer, and stakeholder surveys show that BANE-identified opportunities are perceived as significantly more promising than controls. Our work contributes three salient design insights to the information systems literature: multilayer signal fusion is necessary for identifying truly promising brand alliance opportunities; consumer comention networks systematically align with theory-grounded alliance covariates, providing a distinct informational input for alliance prediction; and coupling prediction with qualification and prescription enhances managerial actionability. These insights enable a scalable, data-driven alternative to survey-based alliance search, generating predictive knowledge that can motivate future causal research on the mechanisms underlying brand alliance formation.

History: Olivia Liu Sheng, Senior Editor; Mochen Yang, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2025.1792.