Brand collaborations aren’t always the most advisable pursuit in marketing. In some cases, particularly when major brands are in a trend of collaborating anyway, such a move can come off as attention-seeking or as a gimmick. Sometimes, however, these team-ups produce innovative, creative, and new ways to interact with the products and services made by the brands or, better yet, improve both side of the collaboration.
In recent years, a few brand collaborations have offered the new blueprint for a successful coming together, and in most cases, you’re looking at both timely team-ups and novel, creative ideas coming from the joint effort.
Creating an Eye-Catching Unlikely Pairing
Two of the most commonplace forms of brand collaborations come with a food company infusing their product into that of another food company, such as the Doritos x Taco Bell move, and clothing designers teaming up to crossover audiences. However, the real key to a successful brand collaboration comes from innovation and surprising consumers with unlikely pairings.
Not only does melding two seemingly disparate brands together catch the eye, but it also allows for the most amount of creativity from the designers of the new product and the marketers. Seeing how brands from different sectors can somehow come together to forge something new is a big part of what makes the best team-ups catch peoples’ attention – which is the ultimate goal – but also even make them endure beyond the initial campaign.
This can be seen in the world of online entertainment right now, where brand collaborations have exploded in a sector that itself was a mash together of two products. The world of slingo is now loaded with branded games drawn from the wider online casino space. Slingo itself is slot gaming combined with bingo, and now, popular games like Da Vinci diamonds, Starburst, and Sweet Bonanza have their own themed slingo crossovers.
Making a Shocking Statement
Collaboration between brands not only results in a crossing over of creative ideas to create a new product or service but, most of the time, the corporate fluff that comes with the announcement details the “aligned brand ethos,” or their “shared values.” It’s all rather droll until the collaboration highlights something a bit more shocking or offers up an idea between the two that can get people thinking.
With The Last of Us Season 2 from HBO and Sony on the way, they went down a somewhat dark path to get some brand collaborations out there. In the story that originated from a hit video game duology, cordyceps evolves, infects the food supply, and ends up causing an apocalypse from which few humans are left to survive. So, naturally, there’s now The Last of Us Four Sigmatic high-caffeine coffee with infused cordyceps mushrooms!
You could also look to the continual run of collaborations that Liquid Death has cooked up in recent years. Opting to run on the side of being in on the joke of collaborations being gimmicks, while also being finely attuned to the ways of viral and social media marketing, they’ve come up with team-ups. For example, they have collaborated with Van Leeuwen to make hot fudge sundae-flavored sparkling water, also teaming up with Depend’s Pit Diaper, for those who need to go during a mosh pit.
Where there’s a creative angle, something surprising, and preferably a strong end product worthy of the effort, brand collaborations in this current trend can be much more than mere gimmicks. It’s those novel mash-ups that tend to stand the test of time and win in the attention economy.
