Brand Partnerships Strategy: Finding the Right Fit Through Emotional Connection

Brand collaborations are everywhere. This year alone, we’ve seen notable announcements: Nike x SKIMS, Target‘s dual brand partnerships with Champion and Warby Parker, and Lululemon‘s collaboration with Lewis Hamilton. These aren’t just marketing stunts, they’re strategic moves designed to capture attention, spark cultural relevance, and create unique value for consumers.

Successful brand partnerships are more than the sum of their parts. They represent a fusion of creativity, some shared values, and a deep understanding of the emotional connection these brands have with their consumers. That last piece, emotional connection, is often the hardest to define and even harder to measure. That’s where Magid’s proprietary platform, Brand eDNA®, comes in.

The Why Behind Brand Partnerships:

Partnerships allow brands to achieve synergistic value, generating outcomes that surpass individual capabilities. This often translates to expanding audience reach, elevating brand image, or driving innovation more effectively. 

Take Nike x SKIMS: Nike can tap into SKIMS’s culturally relevant, female-centric brand to strengthen its position in the women’s market, which aligns with their recent efforts centered around women’s sports. Simultaneously, SKIMS leverages Nike’s athletic expertise to gain credibility and expand its presence in the activewear sector.

Similarly, Target’s collaboration with Warby Parker showcases the power of combining distinct expertise. Target enhances its position as a destination for affordable, design-forward essentials by incorporating Warby Parker’s stylish eyewear and optical knowledge. Conversely, Warby Parker gains significant physical presence and brand visibility through Target’s extensive retail network.

Ultimately, the “why” behind successful brand partnerships lies in creating a synergistic relationship that amplifies each brand’s unique value proposition, ultimately delivering a more resonant and impactful experience for consumers.

Key Elements of Successful Partnerships:

Several key elements contribute to the success of these collaborations, ensuring they deliver on their intended objectives and create lasting value. Although ultimately, the partnership must feel authentic and credible to consumers. 

Synergistic Brand Positioning: How a brand positions itself in the market – its unique selling proposition, its values, its overall image – should align with its partner. When brands share a common vision and purpose, they are better equipped to collaborate effectively and create a unified message that resonates with their target audience. This brand partnership should enhance, not dilute, each brand’s positioning.

• Example: The brand partnership between Patagonia and iFixit, where both brands are deeply committed to sustainability and empowering consumers to repair their products, exemplifies this alignment.

Shared Target Audience:  The most successful partnerships occur when brands share a portion of their target audience. This ensures that the collaboration will be relevant and appealing to both customer bases, maximizing reach, impact, and increasing overall market share. 

• Example: The partnership between Red Bull and GoPro. Both brands target adventurous, thrill-seeking individuals, making the collaboration a natural fit.

Complementary Strengths: Successful partnerships leverage the unique strengths and capabilities of each brand. By combining their respective expertise, resources, and market positions, brands can achieve synergies that would be impossible to attain individually.

• Example: The collaboration between Apple and Nike, where Apple’s technology integrates seamlessly with Nike’s fitness expertise, creating a powerful ecosystem for consumers.
• Example: The collaboration between LEGO and various movie franchises (Star Wars, Marvel). LEGO’s playful and imaginative brand personality complements the adventurous and fantastical nature of these franchises.

Understanding the Emotional Connection: Successful partnerships often forge a strong emotional connection with consumers. Brands evoke specific emotions, and when these emotions align or complement each other, the partnership can resonate more deeply. Understanding these emotional dynamics is crucial. Tools that provide data-driven insights into brand perception and emotional connections can be invaluable in assessing the potential for a successful partnership.

Despite the potential upside, not all brand partnerships succeed. The wrong alignment can confuse consumers, dilute brand equity, or simply fail to resonate. Many companies rely on intuition or past experience to evaluate potential partners, but in today’s data-driven world, that’s not enough. Understanding the core DNA of each brand involved is essential.

Stronger brand partnerships using Magid’s emotional data

At Magid, we specialize in understanding the emotional DNA of brands. Brand eDNA® is our proprietary data product that helps companies identify:

✔ The emotions that drive their brand’s appeal
✔ Which potential partners elevate (or detract from) their brand
✔ How to optimize marketing to trigger the right emotional response

Without this insight, brands are often left to guesswork when choosing collaboration partners. As one major hotel brand CMO put it, “Our tie-ins are just picked by our execs’ rolodexes and hunches. And afterward, we can’t truly say what effect it had on our brand.”