History

White-labeling has become a regular practice where the core idea is to bring a product or service to market faster and potentially cheaper, while developing or capitalizing on an existing brand identity.

The concept originates in the music industry, where producers would commit to a small run - as few as 300 - units of a particular record where the circular label in the middle of the vinyl was deliberately left blank. One of the advantages was to have it judged and tested by DJs based on the quality of the music alone rather than the name or expectations of the artist. Low outlay, low risk but with a sense of exclusivity that sometimes created a cult following and viral buzz that created a platform for a successful full release.

As supermarkets went through a phase of rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s, they started to exploit their positioning by creating own-brand versions of existing products. Fans of these whitelabled products were easily convinced that the baked beans in the supermarket branded tin were exactly the same as the version available for 20% more along the aisle.

In the software industry, white-labeling has become a common practice by firms to offer a service to their customers without going through the full development cycle. There are a number of advantages to this approach:

• Speed to market - the challenge is integration, not the full development cycle from ideation to testing.
• Specialist expertise - there are advantages to both parties of matching technical and branding expertise to take a proposition to market.
• Cost reduction - the white-label partner should be able to enjoy sufficient economies of scale both parties can benefit from savings.
• Scalability - designed well, the underpinning platform will allow for rapid scaling, ideally dynamically, allowing for peaks in usage.

However, classically, there are pitfalls to watch out for:

• Quality ownership - it’s essential that quality expectations are matched on both sides and that the technical capability is there to meet them.
• Co-dependence - both parties put significant costs and energy into creating the white-label and a deep partnership is often needed to make it work.
• Customization - if the options to personalise the user experience are limited, the value to the customer will be equally so.
• Commoditization - this leads to a vanilla experience with the risk that the end user feels undervalued and a commodity themselves.

So how, in 2024, do we manage to ensure that partnerships gain the benefits from whitelabel relationships while mitigating the potential pitfalls?

What white-labeling means at Tickitto

Tickitto is, first and foremost, an API company. We take the world’s most exciting live inventory and then we use our proprietary methodology to consolidate, enrich, enhance and aggregate the data so that it can be presented in our unique way meaning that our API is so quick and easy to implement (as an example see our Juno case study). This is the engine for 100% of our partnerships.

However, for a significant proportion, our partners require us to provide a web app interface for them to manage the user experience. This involves a redirect from the ‘home brand’ to us as a partner which may or not be visible to the end user. So, for us, white-labeling is an umbrella term that covers the different permutations of that working practice. These are:

1. Pure white-label - where we brand our web app to the specifications provided by the partner using their brand guidelines. Take a look at the Careem Tickets and Passes app to see how well that can work (that’s us, if you were wondering).
2. Co-brand - the cases where the brand wants to be the dominant presence on the web app but where the customer needs to be aware that the purchase is with a trusted partner. Mastercard Priceless - yes, for Broadway, that’s us too.
3. Pure partner model - where the partner wants to add breadth and depth to their value proposition but needs the transaction to be a full handoff to a trusted partner. Look at Amex’s site for Live Events (that’s us via our direct-to-consumer brand Tikety).

So we’re more than a white-label but not just in these ways. Our web application has a high degree of customisation built in. Want to link to a specific event from content on your site. No problem. Maybe you’d like to go to a performer or team page, showing every event we have in date order? Just as easy.

Maybe, actually, there’s a need to link to editorial content that covers a topic that resonates with your audience or a subset of them. For the airline launching a new flight path from London to New York in April, why not collaborate with our team to write a specific event blog that highlights the things to do in either City in Spring.

Deeper embeddedness

For some of our partners the journey from their own eco-system to our extension of it is no more than a proof of concept, testing the question of whether access to events and attractions deepens and extends their relationship and increases wallet share. In other words, it’s a step along the way to a fully embedded relationship where our API feeds a checkout process on their own site or their own app. Sure, just let us know the migration path and we’ll be ready to support that every step of the way.

But embeddedness is not just technical. If a customer clicks a link on a partner site and lands on our web app, for us we are simply managing an experience for that customer on behalf of our partner. This is radically different to the core white-label experience. Even though the customer will come back to our site and review tickets in their account, we always know they are not our customer and that the relationship is with the home brand. And within the bounds of UK GDPR (under which we are registered and operate) we will share data as required.

This is ideological for us and not something we plan to change.