Brand Collaborations – Rise of The X

The rise of brand collaborations has been impossible to escape in our feeds. Vogue even challenged to say Tired: The letter X. However, while initially there may have been a mad rush towards collaboration to fit in with the crowd. We love seeing the heart behind the X grow in brand collaborations.

Attending Rag Trader LIVE in Melbourne, Collaboration was a key pillar for the brands presenting on stage. It showed the key ways to utilise collaboration in your brand strategy.

Building Your Tribe – Invest Long Term in Brand Collaborations

Reebok spoke about using Brand Collaborations to Build your Tribe. Amongst a challenging repositioning for the brand to once again become relevant to pop culture audiences. They have been able to leverage their long standing collaborations with Cross Fit. Which has enabled the investment in the growth in new spaces, knowing they can trust the consistency of the long term brand collaboration to pay off.

Creating Exclusivity – Use Collaboration as USP

The Iconic as a retailer in a highly competitive market, were a USP may simply be speed of delivery or quality of recommendations has really been able to leverage collaborations with designers as points of difference with their customers.

Authentic Brand Collaboration

A panel of Instagram Influencers (sorry Creators!) discussed what makes the best post for brands. The answer, when the brand respects what they stand for and allows the Creator to make something that brings the best of them. They’ve learned the hard ways to say no to any briefs that don’t respect the audience they have built.

Intentional Collaborators

We’re really proud to be working with 2 incredible clients who are embracing Collaboration as key to building their brands. Firstly, LE Rose who embodied all 3 of these with their latest capsule launch with influencer Jordan. Working with Jordan for years to help grow their brand. They’ve allowed her to create an exclusive range. Adding enormous value for the customer and honours the values of both brand and influencer.

While Thankyou and Sage & Clare searched for an Authentic Brand partner that embodied their values, and what I love about this collaboration is the ‘X’ is dropped replaced with ‘and’. At the launch event it was a celebration of the Collision & Connection that came as part of combining two passionate businesses.

In many ways this was the summary point of all the smaller collaboration elements discussed yesterday. That the best will come from collaboration when the relationship means more than a cool looking X.

We Rise As We Lift Others Up

If you spend long enough with the team at Thankyou, you will hear the team recite this quote.

It’s at the heart of everything they do. I believe it’s the key to unlock any successful brand collaboration.