Collaboration needn’t be the exclusive preserve of the French during wartime. In a world where people are assembling a patchwork of brands around themselves in a bid to show the world who they are and what they believe it pays to know who you’re being lumped in with – and on occasion to force those connections.
Of course there are different approaches to collaboration between brands, and those approaches depend largely on the situation that you find yourself in.
Model One. Media / Content Partners
Take for example the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and the US post office. Star Wars needs to achieve ubiquity – universal awareness. The post office is part of the fabric of every town in America, it has real estate, it has installations (in the form of post boxes) and of course it has collectibles (in the form of stamps)… what the post office needs is injection of interest and of cash. That can come in the form of exclusive stamps. What Star Wars needs is visibility – that can come from painting mailing boxes as R2D2 and from the PR you get from having your own stamp. Done well it’s a win-win. Post office used as media vehicle and rewarded with profit from a one-off product (stamps) – Star Wars even more entrenched in popular culture.
Perhaps a better example, certainly one that feels more modern was the collaboration between ubiquitous convenience chain 7-Eleven and The Simpson’s Movie. 7-Eleven agreed to totally rebrand a dozen of their stores (I know it seemed like more) as Kwik-E-Marts (the convenience store in the cartoon)… in addition to the rebranded stores all 7-Eleven’s would carry some of The Simpson’s most famous fictional products… Buzz Cola, Krusty-Os, Sprinklicious donuts and Squishees. Throw in exclusively designed point of sale and you have a PR stunt that generates yards and yards of press, a movie that opens ahead of estimates and a store that sells out of all proprietary products and more than 3 million bits of Simpson’s shit. Cool.
Model Two. Blurring the (on)line.
Some brands live online. They have no physical footprint. That’s not an issue, but it does throw out a tantalizing opportunity for brand collaboration. When you throw together two brands, on virtual, one bricks and mortar and add a willingness to blur the lines between virtual reality and actual reality (VR and AR?) you can get something interesting.
Take for example H&M and The Sims. This could have been a case of two brands with a shared demographic coming together and doing a coupon exchange. It would have worked too. Sell The Sims in H&M, advertise H&M in The Sims. What we got instead was a decent blurring of the lines, H&M gets integrated into the new Sims game. You can buy an add on module that allows you to shop in the virtual store, to try on virtual clothes, to meet with virtual friends. This offers H&M the chance to showcase new lines and gives The Sims an anchor store within the virtual world. But then they took it further. If you wanted to you could design clothes within the game, which would be sent to H&M who in turn would make some of the clothes designed in the virtual world and sell them in the real world. Yes it still has the stench of competition about it (why don’t you offer to make anything I design?) but it turns the game into a two way street – and that’s a door worth pushing against.
Model Three. Shared Host, Shared Occasion. Opportunity to Innovate.
Nike and Apple don’t have a whole lot in common. Really. One’s about a celebration of participation in physical activity, the other is about unleashing an individual’s creative potential. One lives on the track and pounding the street, the other in dark bedrooms and glossy graphic design studios.
But the Nike Shoe and the I-Pod shared two things. They shared a demographic and they shared an occasion. The people out pounding pavement were listening to music on their I-pods as they went. Now I’ve worked in Innovation companies and I know that at some point both Nike and Apple will have been approached with this ‘Insight’ (again it’s an observation but in the Innovation world an Observation is worth nothing whereas an insight is a $200,000 project) and told “Nike you should make a MP3 shoe” or “Apple, it’s time for the I-sneaker”
Both ludicrous of course. Apple have no expertise in shoes and Nike none in well designed electronics. But the idea will have been floated.
So it’s to the credit of the companies that they saw the opportunity and decided to go for it together. Nike+ puts a ‘digital pebble’ in the shoes of its runner, the pebble talks to your I-pod, you get all kinds of information recorded – from your speed and distance to your route. Throw in an online community for some competition and you have a collaboration that’s useful to runners, that allows one party to take the lead, that sells additional hardware and that gives both companies more access to their customers (via the website) and consequently extra opportunities to sell (‘hey you’ve done 1000 miles, time for new shoes’, ‘here’s the prefect playlist for your run’)
It’s a delicate balance… and ego could get in the way, but Collaboration for Innovation seems like a place to explore in the future.
Model Four. Trading Credibility and Accessibility.
Your brand has a great product but it’s not taken seriously enough. You want to demo your product. Their brand has a great product but it’s really niche, people don’t know that they’d enjoy it. Time for a brand tie-up.
When HP wanted to demonstrate the quality of its high end printers it got together with the National Gallery. The strategy? reproduce some of the most spectacular National Gallery pieces using HP equipment, and then post those pieces of art all over London, in some really incongruous places. Throw in a phone number by each piece that allows The National Gallery to talk you through it in an accessible way and a website that lists all of the locations of the art and allows HP to talk about the quality of its printing and you have a campaign that brings new people into contact with the National Gallery and gives HP the kind of visibility that it couldn’t buy – especially as the PR cloud turned into a mushroom cloud of chatter.
So – one question to ask when looking at communication on your brand… “Who would we love invite onboard with this one?” and “What’s in it for them as well as us.”
Simple stuff but worth asking.
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