2023, 5 ways to play cross-border collaboration

Nowadays, co-branding has become a common way of brand marketing. Based on past observations of co-branding trends, we have sorted out 5 common ways of co-branding.

As the traffic dividend dries up, brands are gradually entering an era of internal competition for existing resources. "Cross-border collaborations" have become a hot topic for major brands to break industry barriers and open up new markets.

This year, cross-border brand collaborations have entered a blowout period, with new cross-border collaborations announced almost every week, such as Heytea x Fendi, Mixue Ice City x China Post, Luckin Coffee x Moutai...

Based on our observations of past collaboration trends, we have sorted out 5 common collaboration methods.

01 Celebrity collaboration

Co-branded products are the most common form of brand collaboration, and are also an advanced form of collaboration based on "celebrity endorsements."

By using concrete co-branded products, the stars and brands are bundled together to quickly increase product awareness and brand image. In the long run, as the star's status rises, brand awareness will also rise.

In addition, brands generally tend to look for celebrities in the same industry, and the target audience is more precise. For example, sports brands look for sports stars, fashion brands look for entertainment stars, maternal and child brands look for married female stars, and fast-moving consumer brands look for traffic stars.

In practice, the most common practice is to print celebrity portraits on products, or to combine a certain flagship product with celebrity peripherals to form a co-branded gift box. These celebrity-customized products often become collectibles that many fans buy crazily.

A deeper level of cooperation would be to allow celebrities to participate in the design as designers.

In 2022, Armani's sub-brand Emporio Armani invited spokesperson Yi Yang Qianxi to design a new "Chinese character-like" pattern for clothing, combining traditional Chinese cultural ink painting and the concept of recycling.

Fans will convert their support for stars into purchases of co-branded products. In the long run, the unique emotional connection carried by co-branded products will also allow brands to effectively avoid homogeneous competition and quickly break out of the circle.

However, "celebrity collaborations" often mean endorsements worth tens of millions and time-consuming and labor-intensive new product development, and are only suitable for large brands that are in urgent need of expanding into new markets and have sufficient budgets.

Many small and medium-sized brands will choose to collaborate with "Internet celebrities KOLs", who also have a broad fan base, industry authority, and are more affordable, and can be regarded as an alternative to "celebrity endorsements".

In 2016, fashion blogger @李贝卡 collaborated with the Palace Museum Cultural Jewelry to launch a co-branded "Palace Museum·Cat's Fantasy" jewelry item, which was sold out in just 20 minutes.

There are also examples like this, such as the domestic makeup brush brand Ainoqi collaborating with beauty KOL @水蛋蛋 to launch the "Cat" brush set, and Wang Baobao Cereal and B Station UP host @帅你一脸毛蛋 launching a co-branded "Girl's Heart" strawberry cheese breakfast cereal, which sold out 5,000 copies in 2 hours.

For brands facing a homogeneous market and in urgent need of boosting sales, in addition to inviting celebrities, they can actually seek out KOLs who are more capable of bringing products to collaborate, discuss cooperation and profit sharing.

For influencers, they need to monetize their fans and consolidate their position in the industry. For brands, they need to screen more precise customer groups and open up a window for pan-precise customer flow. Co-branding with influencers is a good channel.

02 IP co-branding

In recent years, there have been frequent scandals involving celebrities and internet celebrities, and the brands related to them are also vulnerable to public opinion attacks.

Therefore, many brands have to find ways to "diversify risks" and start turning to "IP co-branding" with a higher safety factor, which can be specifically divided into film and television IP, game IP, cultural IP, national IP, cultural and creative IP...

The specific IP to be linked to depends mainly on the brand's marketing objectives at that stage.

For example, Pop Mart and Chinese Philatelic IP jointly launched the "Year of the Rabbit Chinese Zodiac Stamp Limited Gift Box" to promote the recognition of traditional culture among young people;

Perfect Diary and the British Museum IP collaboration further deepens the brand connotation of "Beauty without Limits" through a cross-border collaboration of art IPs.

The joint creation of Zhuyeqing and the traditional IP "Only Green" showcases the beauty of Chinese tea while consolidating the positioning of Chinese high-end green tea.

In the "2023 Cross-border Joint Marketing Trend Report" produced by SocialBeta, the top 10 popular IPs are summarized. Among them, game IP ranks first, and "Honor of Kings" is the first choice for many brand IP joint ventures.

After all, which young people don’t play mobile games nowadays? This has become a shortcut for many brands to break through the youth market. They have launched joint-branded wedding dresses for female heroes with WECOUTURE, limited-edition lipsticks with MAC, and joint credit cards with Ping An Bank. The IP joint ventures of “Honor of Kings” cover multiple fields such as beauty, fast-moving consumer goods, and 3C.

The second is film and television IP. Well-known foreign IP images include Disney, Minions, Ultraman, etc. The most common one is the KFC IP co-branded meal, which uses IP co-branding to create a major marketing event and quickly increase exposure and discussion in a short period of time.

There is also the Barbie IP that was very popular some time ago. With the hot release of the movie, it successfully triggered a wave of "pink consumption". Consumer brands such as Burger King, Nike, Xbox, NYX, Miniso, Crocs and others have all rushed to collaborate with it to launch joint series and derivative peripherals.

With the booming national economy, many brands have also set their sights on some classic domestic animation/film and television IPs. For example, the outdoor sports brand Kalenji has cooperated with the IP of "Havoc in Heaven".

When a classic IP appears, it can evoke the childhood memories of several generations, which is very suitable for playing the emotional card. By visualizing the IP image of Sun Wukong, the spirit of "brave exploration" of Kalas can be more grounded, making it easier to achieve the communication goal of brand and user value resonance.

IP co-branding is a good method, but the key is to find an IP that suits the preferences of the brand's target group, so as to achieve a marketing effect of 1+1>2.

03 Co-create a joint brand

Two brands that have made achievements in their respective fields combine their strengths to launch joint products. This has been a very popular approach in consumer goods in recent years and is mainly used in two scenarios.

The first one is that brands leverage other brand labels through joint ventures and embed “new product selling points” into users’ minds.

For example, the cross-border collaboration between Kiehl's and Wang Laoji is based on the subtle connection that both calendula and herbal tea have the property of "clearing heat", one is used externally to clear heat, and the other is taken internally to clear heat. With the concrete national image of "drinking Wang Laoji when you get angry", the product awareness of "using calendula water for acne" is further strengthened and upgraded.

In addition, a limited-time pop-up store called "Marigold Herbal Tea Shop" was set up in Guangzhou, with peripheral products such as folding fans, canvas bags, refrigerator magnets, and Cantonese-only dialect cans set up on site to revitalize the herbal tea culture and attract more young people to pay attention to these two century-old brands.

The second type is the collaboration between old and new brands, where old brands become younger and new brands gain cultural heritage. The recent Luckin Coffee x Moutai collaboration is a typical example.

For Luckin, it is to use the low price of 9.9 yuan to break through the "Moutai" and move towards the higher-end business market. For Moutai, it is to use "Luckin" to promote the sauce-flavored flavor of Moutai liquor and cultivate a younger consumer group.

How much spark this co-creation collaboration can ultimately generate depends mainly on the topicality and market awareness of both brands.

In this regard, Luckin's collaboration is still remarkable. From the "Coconut Cloud Latte" launched in collaboration with Coco Tree Group to the "Sauce Flavor Latte" launched across borders with Moutai, the brands chosen are all brands with strong social attributes and topicality.

04 Traffic Joint

If you want to find two brands that have their own topic traffic, such a collaboration is hard to come by, but there is another clever idea: "create topics."

Xiaolongkan and Lengshenling jointly launched "hot pot flavored toothpaste", which specially added chili factors and was divided into moderately spicy, slightly spicy in Sichuan and Chongqing, and extremely spicy, to experience an "absolutely stimulating" toothbrushing experience. The conflict created by "extremely spicy hot pot" and "cool feeling of toothpaste" successfully captured the curiosity of young people.

Similar cases include Liushen and RIO jointly launching "floral water cocktail", Zhiyouquan and Xiao Yang Shengjian jointly launching "Xiao Yang Shengjian mask", REClassified jointly launching "condom perfume" with Okamoto, and Heytea and Wenheyou jointly launching the dark cuisine "stinky tofu cake"... The more unrelated the industry "weird" collaboration is, the easier it is to stimulate the public's "freshness" about the brand. After all, for this generation of young people, "weird" is a way of life that opens up social topics and highlights individuality.

These collaborations are often aimed at "grabbing traffic" and quickly increasing brand exposure in a short period of time. They are suitable as a warm-up stage for major brand events and as a way to use "topics" to leverage the brand's popularity.

05 Scene collaboration

In the new consumption era, consumers not only focus on a single product, but also care about the values ​​and lifestyle behind the brand.

This change has also forced brands to start building "brand scenarios", from selling products and upgrades to selling lifestyles.

It is also a good way to gain insight into current consumption trends, find brands with complementary functions, and jointly build new social scenarios for young people.

On May 20th last year, Xiaodu Tiantian and MINI officially announced the "Drive and Sing Camping" experience event, using the Tiantian rotating smart screen T10 to modify the MINI trunk and realize in-car KTV, starting a new life of self-driving camping and karaoke.

Upgrading the previous "listening to music for entertainment" to "singing whenever you want", the concrete in-car scene presentation and immersive user experience naturally highlight the selling point of the Tiantian Rotating Smart Screen T10.

From selling products to selling lifestyles, it is actually about building a beautiful life imagination for users.

Following this line of thought, you might as well pay more attention to current popular life events, such as camping, hiking, cycling, frisbee, citywalk, etc., and think more about how the brand can be integrated into the user's life scenes and what problems it can solve. —

Although the joint venture method is good, it is not that easy to implement in practice.

To connect unrelated A and B, you need to find an unexpected intersection. In addition, you need to consider the preferences of the audiences of both parties, otherwise it is easy to backfire.

For example, SUAMOMENT previously collaborated with Ma Yinglong to launch a lipstick, which was bold and topical, but this kind of collaboration only made people physically uncomfortable and was ridiculed by the public.

"Everything can be co-branded" has become a trend, but it is also inevitable to fall into the dilemma of homogeneity. How to play with new ideas and find brand opportunities still requires the brand direction to look inward and connect outward.

Author: Black Little Finger

WeChat public account: Shock Copywriter