Five shapes
Most arrangements are a version of one of five things. Recognising which one is on the table prevents a common error: negotiating the terms of one shape while both sides privately expect the behaviour of another.
Referral is the lightest. One party introduces a prospective buyer to the other and takes no further part. Nothing is shared except the introduction. It requires almost no structure and produces almost no dependence.
Reselling and distribution put one party between the producer and the buyer. The reselling party takes a margin, and often takes stock, credit risk and the customer relationship along with it. Control over how the product is presented moves substantially away from the producer.
Co-marketing keeps both offerings separate and shares only the promotion: a joint event, a shared campaign, a bundle. Money usually moves only as shared cost, not as shared revenue.
A joint venture creates a separate vehicle. The parties contribute resources to it, and it has its own staff, its own accounts and often its own management. It is the heaviest instrument short of acquisition.
A consortium is a group acting together on a defined piece of work, frequently without creating a company at all. Each member remains responsible for its own part, and the group's structure exists mainly to present a single face to a customer or a regulator.
The shapes side by side
| Shape | Control given up | How money moves | Typical duration | Difficulty of exit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referral | Almost none | Fee per introduction, or reciprocity with no payment | Open-ended, low intensity | Trivial |
| Reselling and distribution | Presentation, pricing at the point of sale, the customer relationship | Margin taken by the reselling party | One to three years, renewed | Moderate; the customer relationships sit with the reseller |
| Co-marketing | Some control over how the identity is presented | Shared cost; revenue stays separate | Campaign length, often months | Easy, once commitments are met |
| Joint venture | Substantial: decisions move to the vehicle's own governance | Contributions in, share of results out | Years, sometimes decades | Hard; assets, staff and contracts sit inside the vehicle |
| Consortium | Limited, but each member is exposed to the others' performance | Split of a single customer contract | The length of the work | Hard while the work is live, simple afterwards |
Choosing between them
Three questions usually settle it.
Does anything need to be jointly owned? If the work will produce assets, staff or contracts that genuinely belong to both parties, a separate vehicle earns its cost. If it will not, a contract is lighter and does the same job.
Who must the customer see? If the customer has to face one party and only one, the arrangement is a resale, a white label or a consortium with a lead member. If the customer can happily see both, lighter shapes are available.
How quickly might this need to end? The heavier the shape, the more expensive the ending. Parties in fast-moving markets routinely over-build the structure and then find that the structure outlives the reason for it.
Mixed and staged arrangements
Shapes are frequently combined or sequenced. A referral relationship that produces steady volume becomes a reseller relationship. A reseller relationship that requires shared investment in a facility becomes a joint venture for that facility while the reselling continues alongside it. There is nothing wrong with this, provided each layer has its own written scope. The failure mode is a single document that describes one shape while the parties have quietly drifted into another.
Staging also helps with the asymmetry problem. Starting light and adding weight as evidence accumulates gives the smaller party time to build standing and the larger party time to verify delivery, without either committing to a structure that would be painful to unwind.
Where this leads
Each of the main shapes has its own working problems. Channel arrangements live or die on margin and conflict; joint ventures on governance and contribution; co-marketing on audience overlap.