This may be critical for success in highly competitive fields. Moreover, when compared with co-marketing, there is no confusion over brand names with an undiluted effort being focused on promoting just one product. An additional and important factor is the reduction in price competition when only one brand is being marketed. In particular, co-promotion is considered to be an excellent strategy as a patent approaches its expiry because it can maximise the exposure of the trade name before generic competition arrives. An example of this new line was Hoechst's co-promotion of Wellcome's prescription acyclovir in Germany.
Smaller companies wishing to gain marketing experience can also benefit from co-promotion.
By choosing a major company as the co-promotion partner the return on the NCE is assured and the major company is unthreatened by the smaller company. This also allows the small business to start building its own reputation in the market-place. An example of this is Amgen's co-promotion of Neupogen with Roche. Inevitably, there are some disadvantages with co-promotion. There can be real difficulties in motivating representatives because they face direct competition from the sales force of the other co-promotion partner.