Unexpected collaboration: A shortcut to growth
Collaborating with like-minded brands is a great way to create growth. It can in an instant, introduce you to a strong community of people likely to engage. This becomes even more interesting when it’s an unexpected collaboration…
BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP35 – Unexpected collaboration: A shortcut to growth
Collaboration is a great way to create growth because in an instant it can introduce you to a strong community of like-minded people. So there will be brands that may be a natural collaboration for your brand. But today what I want to talk about is unexpected collaborations. So I’ve got two examples I want to share with you. So in August, it was announced that David Jones was partnering with BP to bring premium food to the convenience space. So there was a lot of surprise around this. Although when you think about it we all know that we need better food in petrol stations. So it does make a lot of sense. But for David Jones, they’ve always been top of the range, premium positioning which is quite different to the convenience space. So this is what makes it really interesting and it means in terms of pricing there needs to be a bit of a meet in the middle approach. So the products might be a bit cheaper than in David Jones but a bit more than what the BP audience is used to. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how this unfolds.
Another interesting collaboration recently was between arch-rivals McDonald’s and Burger King. So every year McDonald’s has the McHappy Day where they donate a portion of every Big Mac sold to the Ronald McDonald House for children with cancer. So in support of this Burger King released a campaign, this was in Argentina, and it was called The Day Without The Whopper and they basically promoted that they would not be selling burgers in support of McDonald’s. This was a really bold and risky move and what it meant was McDonald’s sold an extra 70,000 burgers to normal. But it had amazing PR and talkability and it really humanised the Burger King brand. So I thought that was a really interesting one to share with you as well.
Unexpected or not, collaborations are a great way to get in front of a wider audience. You can generate talkability and just have a bit of fun with your brand. Does it need to be carefully considered? Of course it does, just like anything but it’s a great area that you can explore in your marketing mix. That’s it for me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: November 7, 2019