Cross-marketing is the exchange of marketing ressources by complementary businesses to generate more visibility and business for each other.

Cross marketing is however often confused with co-marketing.

Cross-marketing and co-marketing are two different marketing forms however.

Cross-marketing is the advertising barter. Nothing new is created.

It's just company A including the products or services of company B in it's marketing while company B includes the products or services of company A in it's marketing. For mutual benefit, that's cross marketing.

Co-marketing on the other hand covers the joint promotion of a jointly developped product.

This means company A and company B will promote product or service AB which they jointly developped or bundled. Also for mutual benefit, but this is not cross-marketing, this is co-marketing.

Another way to see the difference between cross-marketing and co-marketing is to look at the roots of the words cross and co.

The "Cross" in cross marketing refers to "across".
The "Co" in co-marketing refers to "joint"

A good example should illustrate the difference between cross-marketing and co-marketing.

Imagine eBay and the Post making a cross-marketing deal.
This would make sense as both eBay and the Post depend for a nice part of their income from people who have to go to the Post office (to send the stuff they sold on eBay to the buyer).

In this cross-marketing deal, eBay and the Post could foresee that eBay will promote the services of the Post to it's members in newsletters and on the site while the Post will promote eBay in it's many post offices. However, it's not just about promotion as cross-marketing is a little bit more than cross-promotion. Both eBay and the Post could make special internet pages or booklets to alert their common database about this promotion.
None of the parties make new things in this cross-marketing example, it's just promotion or basic marketing.

So what could co-marketing do more than cross-marketing?

Imagine eBay and the Post again designing a post box together. The materials and the know how on how to make this post box is brought by the Post and will be very valuable for the co-marketing deal.

eBay from it's side allows the eBay logo to be printed on the box, consults the Post on how it's members would like the see the box developped and will promote this box agressively to it's client base.

The two partners jointly develop and market a new product: the eBay Postbox. It's a true blue example of co-marketing.

We repeat that cross-marketing is about the exchange of marketing ressources while co-marketing is about developping and promoting something jointly.

Cross marketing and co-marketing have been used for too long as synonyms.

We hope this explanation and texample will prevent further confusion on the meaning of co-marketing and cross marketing.