Standing out in today’s crowded digital marketplace requires business owners to think creatively about brands. Customer attention is a limited commodity that all brands compete for. But there may be opportunities to partner with other brands to gain consumer attention and loyalty with collaborative projects.
Brand collaboration, or co-branding, is a strategic advertising and marketing partnership between two brands that each bring success to the other. Collaborating with another brand can help you to share costs, expand your reach, obtain new insights, and grow your business.
Brand collaboration done right can be a win-win for both companies. To keep a partnership from turning sour, however, you should think ahead and lay a strong legal groundwork for success.
When Co-Branding Goes Right
Ideally, partners should align on core values while bringing something unique to the partnership. The synergy of a brand relationship can enhance the strengths of each partner while helping them overcome limitations.
For example, when CoverGirl partnered with the Star Wars brand on a new sci-fi-inspired makeup line around the release of The Force Awakens, the campaign was a hit, allowing the makeup brand to market to female Star Wars fans—an estimated 12 million women. An extensive public relations campaign enabled the CoverGirl Star Wars collection to become the top trend on Facebook, with a 725 percent boost in retailer sell-in and over 250 million website impressions in two days.
HubSpot explains that this was a win-win because it allowed CoverGirl to tap into the Star Wars pop culture phenomenon while getting CoverGirl buyers (i.e., young women) excited about a film franchise that has traditionally been marketed to men.
In short, the collaboration allowed each company to engage with the other brand’s customer base while sticking to its individual strengths. These are hallmarks of a well-planned and executed co-branding campaign.
Hard work played a big part in this campaign’s success as well. Creative Director Sterling Sanders explains how his company set up CoverGirl to succeed using a multipronged strategy that was carefully unfolded for maximum impact.
When Co-Branding Goes Wrong
There are many examples of brand collaborations working to partners’ mutual benefit, but there have been lots of swings and misses, too. HubSpot highlights Kendall Jenner and Pepsi, Target and Neiman Marcus, Kraft and Starbucks, Forever 21 and Atkins, and Shell and LEGO as case studies in co-branding fails. The co-branding mistakes highlighted by these partnerships include
- ineffective communication,
- misaligned values and messaging,
- the partnership did not make sense for both audiences,
- problems over contracts and agreements, and
- poor execution.
Notably, some partnerships, such as Shell and LEGO, can be successful for years until they flame out. LEGO’s race car and gas station sets were long-running hits with kids. Eventually, though, the relationship became problematic for LEGO due to Shell’s poor environmental reputation and consumer sentiment turning against fossil fuel companies. LEGO failed to renew its marketing agreement with Shell in 2016 following a pressure campaign from Greenpeace.
The Value of Data Collaboration
The reasons why collaborations do not work out can be as nuanced as the reasons that they do work out. Each deal should be evaluated on the strengths of its potential benefits—and risks.
Shell and LEGO tell a tale of a partnership simply outliving its usefulness to one partner. Market conditions are constantly changing, and brands must evolve to keep up. This includes the way they evaluate collaborations.
