8 Fruitful Brand Collaborations to Inspire Your PR Campaigns

11 min readApr 12, 2023

Think about this: You’re walking into an electronics store and seeing a pair of Samsung headphones inspired by your favorite movies, like Star Wars. Wouldn’t you buy them immediately? Even though you already own 2 other headsets? Those aren’t Star Wars, right?

We feel you. Who doesn’t love a product that perfectly combines the stories and the look ’n’ feel of their two favorite brands?

That’s why brand collaborations flourish! Their products are limited and exclusive and their campaigns are surprising.

Brand partnerships were and will always be a win-win PR and marketing practice.

Shall we take a closer look at 8 exciting current and past brand collabs to get some inspiration? After that, we’ll show you how to easily find some collaboration opportunities for your brand.

Let’s do this!

How to Find Brand Collaboration Opportunities?

The truth is that brand partnerships aren’t so hard to implement once you find the right collab brand. That means you should spend some time searching and assessing the brands and businesses you want to build partnerships with.

Here we propose 3 ways you can follow to find the perfect collaboration opportunity for your brand.

Find brands that already talk about you

Start your research for collaboration opportunities by scanning around and checking which brands are already talking about you on social media, or referencing your brand online.

That’s the shortest way of doing brand collabs, without having to introduce your brand from scratch. Plus, the possibility of brand partnerships between those already familiar with each other is higher.

You can use a social media monitoring tool, like Mentionlytics, to track all brands and accounts that mention your brand in their social media posts or website content, like in blogs.

Then, you can narrow down your potential collaborators with sentiment analysis filters, by selecting to view only those that have done positive mentions of your brand. They most likely like your brand and want to be associated with you.

That way you’ll end up with a list of possible brand partners that are already familiar with your brand. This will give you a higher chance of collaborating with other brands.

To continue, you should leverage the social media tracker or monitoring platform to run a brief social media audit of every potential collaboration brand on your list.

Pro Tip: Check their social accounts to see if the content they create fits your brand’s story. Get a glimpse of their brand reputation by monitoring what people say about them online. Familiarize yourself with their marketing and PR campaigns, before deciding which brands you’ll work with.

Track your branded or campaign hashtags

Hashtag tracking is another way of spotting brands that are willing to collaborate with you. You can use a monitoring platform for this purpose as well.

Add the hashtags with #yourbrandname or the dedicated hashtags you have created for your recent marketing and PR campaigns.

The listening tool will bring back all mentions of those hashtags and you can follow the process explained above to find which brands have created social media content with your hashtags.

Participate in Industry Events

Taking part in popular in-person or online events is another great way of seeking brand collaborations. Especially, in face-to-face events, you can sharpen your networking skills and get to meet colleagues that work for other interesting brands in your industry.

Cultivating relationships with other marketing and PR teams can be the first step toward long-lasting and fruitful brand partnerships. Also, during events, you usually hear about new brand collaborations that can inspire you!

These were just some simple ways to create awesome brand collaborations and partnerships. Now, if you’re wondering what will be the actual benefits for your brand, keep scrolling!

Why Do Brands Collaborate Together?

There are countless reasons why brands collaborate together to create exclusive products and thrilling campaigns for their customers.

Below we analyze the 4 key ones, that will definitely inspire you to start a brand collab as soon as possible!

Attract new customers

Sales and revenue is always one of the top objectives of every brand collab. Two brands getting together means that their customer bases are merging as well. By creating a joint product, brands expand their reach to different customers.

Furthermore, products of brand collabs have a sense of exclusivity and uniqueness, not to mention that most of the time they are limited editions.

So, that’s a great motive for people to hurry up and buy these products, before going sold out. That in turn means increased sales!

Create Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth will be forever the ultimate goal of every marketer and PR pro on earth. Brand collaborations have the power to surprise and get people excited. That’s pretty much all it takes to get people to talk about your brand!

Plus, if you promote your brand partnerships with fun and joyful campaigns, you might go viral, which will be excellent for your engagement metrics as well.

Share the cost of promotion

When two or more brands come together for a collaboration, they not only join their forces but also their resources. So, brands tend to split the marketing costs for the promotion of their joint products and get more with less.

It’s a win-win situation because they can reach a broader target audience in a cost-effective way.

Sometimes the collaboration is so unexpected and amazing that WOM takes on, so brands can save on promotion budgets.

Boost credibility

Last but not least, brand collaborations can reinforce the credibility and reputation of a brand.

Especially in collaborations between new and established brands, the new brands can be introduced to the existing customers of the established ones, with a hint of trustworthiness and reliability.

That, in turn, can encourage people to purchase from brands they don’t quite know and eliminate the fear of trying something new.

8 Best Brand Collaborations to Inspire Your PR Campaigns

First things first, what is a brand collaboration?

It’s basically when two — or more — brands join forces to create products, campaigns, or both that are mutually beneficial for them. Brand collaborations can happen between any brand, no matter their industry, their customer base, their market share, and anything.

A good idea and willing teams are all it takes. The examples we analyze below are actual proof of that. Go on!

1- Nike x Tiffany & Co.

We shall start our list with one of the latest announced brand collaborations, fresh from the oven: the Nike x Tiffany & Co. partnership.

These two great brands had also come together in the past for a product launch, an exclusive pair of shoes. However, this year they will launch several products, blending the signature aqua color of Tiffany & Co. with the Nike style.

This collection will be officially released in March 2023, but in late January the companies revealed on social media the core product of the Nike x Tiffany & Co collab. It’ll be a pair of Nike Air Force 1 sneakers in black color with the iconic logo of Nike painted in Tiffany blue and some silver details, to give it a luxurious look.

The Nike x Tiffany & Co. collab has already sparked the interest of fans, with millions of likes and shares on social and many media covering the topic.

Source: Instagram

Inspirational Tip: A successful brand collaboration can be surprising and thrilling for your potential customers, even if it has already happened before in the past.

2- Duolingo & HBO Max

In the summer of ’22, Duolingo and HBO Max expanded their collab for the launch of the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon.

What they did: To celebrate the release of the HBO Original “House of the Dragon”, Duolingo updated its existing High Valyrian course, by adding 150 new vocabulary words and 700 new sentences to help Game of Thrones fans learn that totally fictional language that some characters speak on both shows.

Source: Wiki of Thrones

As Duolingo and HBO Max stated in their press release: “This unique partnership around learning High Valyrian will enable fans across the globe to see how fun learning a new language can be while connecting closer with the world of Westeros.”

What a great opportunity for Duolingo to reach new audiences and gain new users from the Game of Thrones fandom. We say: Valar Morghulis!

Inspirational Tip: You don’t have to forge brand collaborations only with businesses relevant to your industry. The more unconventional the collab, the merrier the chances of a higher engagement rate.

3- Airbnb & LEGO

Speaking of unexpected brand collaborations, Airbnb and LEGO smashed it in 2017! Although the two businesses are in very different industries, that didn’t stop them from creating a memorable brand partnership.

For its “Night at” competition, Airbnb offered LEGO fans the chance to make their dream come true and stay overnight in the real-life, 12,000-square meters Lego House, near the original Legoland in Denmark.

Source: Airbnb Newsroom

The winning family of the competition had at their disposal 25 million LEGO bricks to build whatever they desire, enjoy the Lego House all to themselves, and relish a unique experience full of surprises, like fashioning their own lunch with LEGO bricks and sleeping under a LEGO waterfall!

That was a great opportunity for Airbnb to associate its brand name with one of the most popular brands for children and grown-ups, which has a dedicated brand community worldwide.

Inspirational Tip: When evaluating brand collaboration opportunities, always search for brand communities and fandoms. Pick the brands with devoted communities, to accomplish an organically higher engagement rate for your campaigns.

4- Adidas x Gucci

One of the best clothing brand collaborations of 2022 is the Adidas x Gucci collection, with nostalgic streetwear creations. The collection was inspired by the ’80s fitness hype, with vibrant colors, signature bags, and even high heels blending both brands’ styles and elegance.

Adidas and Gucci merged not only their style but even their logos! They kept the classic trefoil logo that Adidas uses to brand its casual and lifestyle collections and added the brand name of the House Gucci. The result was flawless!

Source: Gucci

Inspirational Tip: Don’t be afraid to work with brands from your industry. These collaborations can expand your brand awareness and credibility to new and willing-to-buy audiences.

5- Fendi x Skims

Back to 2021 and clothing brand collaborations. Kim Kardashian’s Skims and the luxury brand Fendi created jointly a highly-anticipated capsule collection that went sold out 24 hours after its launch!

Fendi x Skims was inspired by a vintage Fendi collection created by the fashion legend Karl Lagerfeld. The collection included from puffy jackets and leather dresses to swimwear and sportswear. It was such a successful brand partnership that it also released a second drop of its best-selling styles a month after the original launch.

Source: Instagram

We should highlight that this collaboration had been greatly promoted by Kim Kardashian on social media and other celebrities like Heidi Klum and Ashley Graham, and created much buzz on social.

Inspirational Tip: Blending celebrities into brand collaborations can work miracles for their success and bring back amazing results.

6- Vans x Harry Potter

All Potterheads in the world rejoiced in hearing about Vans collaboration with Warner Bros. Consumer Products to release a Harry Potter collection in the Summer of 2019. At the end of the day, the Harry Potter fans community is still going strong even today, 12 years after the premiere of the series’ last movie in 2011.

So, Vans leveraged fans’ love for all things Harry Potter and launched a magnificent, highly-anticipated collection of shoes, inspired by the 4 Hogwarts Houses. The collection also included clothes and accessories. Although, the real hit was the shoes, which combined Vans’ high quality and comfort with the unique character of each House.

Source: Vans.eu

Inspirational Tip: A successful brand collaboration can embody people’s love for certain pop-culture phenomena, like Harry Potter, Friends, Star Wars, and more!

7- Burger King & Netflix

Netflix is famous for its great partnerships and amazing campaigns. That’s why for the release of Stranger Things Season 3, Burger King teamed up with it to create an Upside Down Whopper for the promotion of Stranger Things’ new season.

It was a brilliant idea, with minimum effort, since there wasn’t something special about the burger itself.

It was just a regular Whopper with the bottom of the bun on the top of the burger and the top of the bun at the bottom of the burger — difficult to explain, easy to visualize, don’t you think? Check out the picture below.

Source: Eater

However, the great hit was actually the packaging. The Upside-Down Whopper was served in vintage Burger King’s classic packaging from the ’80s, the decade when the Stranger Things plot takes place. The special whopper was limited and only available in several Burger King restaurants across the US.

Inspirational Tip: You don’t have to innovate to create a great brand collaboration. Creative co-branding and a cool promotional idea can work just fine!

8- Disney x Pandora

Of course, from the best brand collaborations we couldn’t miss Disney, a company that has done hundreds of partnerships with the most famous and prestigious brands.

This year, Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary, a century of entertaining people. That’s why it renewed or forged collab with brands like LEGO, Adidas, Givenchy, Mattel, Pandora, and others, to create some celebrating product lines.

The products of these famous brand collaborations are going to be launched throughout 2023, but Disney x Pandora is already available, with a 100-years-of-wonder bracelet and an iconic Micky Mouse charm. Pandora will be releasing this collection piece-by-piece throughout the year.

Source: Pandora US

Inspirational Tip: An excellent way to increase the anticipation of your audience for your brand collab products is to release them throughout a specific time period. That will keep them interested and engaged for longer.

And that’s it! Are you feeling inspired right now?

Do you want to explore your brand collaboration opportunities? Let’s see how you can track them down and make sure you won’t miss any.

Conclusion

Brand collaborations and partnerships work great for creating hype around products, increasing sales, and boosting brand image and reputation.

All you have to do is keep your eyes open for potential collab opportunities and don’t be scared to reach out to other brands and invite them to do something together.

As you understood from the examples above, it doesn’t have to be a massive product launch or a big collection. It can be just a joint campaign or a co-branded offer.

Take that step forward. You got this!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/brand-collaborations