Camille Gray is a strategist at Initiative. She specialises in retail marketing, specifically e-commerce, focusing on cultural and media trends. She has a regular column, Add to Cart.
It’s a familiar scene in a marketing agency.
The brainstorm has lost momentum. People stare blankly into the distance. Ideas have run dry.
The painfully soul-sucking silence continues for a few more minutes until someone will desperately (and inevitably) offer up a single phrase:
…”What about a collab?”
Nothing is more satisfying than smashing two logos together on a slide. Like some demented chef, the wilder the combos the better: Aldi x Colette Dunnigan. Supreme x Luis Vuitton. Kim Kardashian x Sharon Strzelecki.
But chucking an ‘x’ between two brands is misleadingly simple, especially if you’re trying to win over anyone born after 1996. In reality, pulling off a collab is a difficult and high-risk game. Like some unchartered Mars mission, your brand is going after places (and people) it hasn’t before.
