Behind Brand Collabs

From best-in-class financial tech platforms to the most-awarded tequila in the world, we work with clients that stand out in their industries—but we’re always looking for new ways to win with brand fans.

Straight off the heels of our successful 21st birthday collaboration with 4 Hands Brewing Co, St. Louis’ largest craft brewery, we’re taking a deeper look at one of the most valuable tools in your brand marketing strategy: effective brand partnerships.

Firstly, let’s define what a brand partnership really is. To be an effective collab (and not just co-branding), a brand partnership must go beyond simply borrowing IP. Both brands need to strategically share equally in the development of creative, messaging, and ultimately in the mutual win of buzz and audience engagement.

Brands, from small to large, are their own universes with storylines, characters and narratives that live in the imagination of their audience. Collaborations are an essential tool to build memorable connections with your audience and compete in a crowded marketplace. Your brand is what people say about you to their friends, give them something to talk about. 

If done right, brand collabs bring an element of surprise and delight, and an opportunity for truly unexpected creative twists. They create a sense of newness and urgency which entertains current fans and taps into new markets, expanding your brand’s relevance, reach and awareness.

If your brand wants to find the right partnership, here’s how you get started: with the ending storyline in mind. Define your ideal goals and what you want your audience to remember about your brand.

But marketers need to be aware of common pitfalls when crafting the collab—so here are a few watchouts:

• From my experiences with many different partnerships, you have to have empathy that every brand is already managing a multitude of other activations and internal objectives in tandem with your co-branded campaign. This can naturally contribute to communication disruptions.
• Like any relationship, communication is key: be clear in objectives and terms, move swiftly, keep execution simple, ensure both parties are equally committed, transparently route all creative, and set up regular status meetings.
• Another common pitfall is relying solely on organic word of mouth to promote the collaboration without co-creating key relevance driving content like lookbook photoshoots, launch events, influencer gifting, and press relations. Paid media is a powerful tool for getting eyes on the campaign.

Your collaborative campaigns will also need new goals and KPIs for what success means compared to your traditional campaigns.

I hope that the near future of brand partnerships continues with the trend of “wild and weird” cross-category pairings. Not only do more sensationally strange pairings earn better chances of nabbing coveted press mentions and notoriety, but they also output truly out-there limited edition product line innovations that from a product design perspective exponentially advances the marketplace for consumers. Social listening will continue to evolve through platform technologies and contribute to generating some of these fan-led brand pairings.

In the future, collaborations will expand into three and four brand pairings creating even more audience reach, unique product lines, and launch through new platforms like virtual and augmented reality.

My biggest learning from working in brand collaborations? It may be cliche, but we can really do bigger things together than we can individually, and audiences will reward you for taking the creative leap together.

Check out our work for more Collabs