If you’re looking for a great opportunity to help promote your company in 2026, it’s through brand collaboration. Lets not get it twisted, we know that this style of marketing has been around for a long time now, but the way I look at it, it’s a marketing tactic that companies don’t often consider ENOUGH, and that can be the difference between great success for both sides alike and a missed opportunity that could catapult your company into beating out competition in your specific industry. Competition is a healthy part of business and marketing, and brand collaboration can really affect it for the best.
In this blog, we’ll explain why you should consider brand collaboration and how it positively impacts your company and its branding.
Bad Examples of Brand Collaboration
Why does brand collaboration work so well? Joint product campaigns and events are not always a thing, but when they are, they more often than not offer consumers a great deal of fun and bang for their buck, depending on which products and brands are being mashed together. There have been many examples of it working well in the past. You also have to keep in mind that there are times when it doesn’t, and that’s something I want to run through first.
A big stigma with marketing these days is that you have to go ALL OUT and be BIG and BOMBASTIC to really get your marketing across to people to promote your products. That’s simply not the correct way to do it. It is a stigma that I see across any type of marketing tactic. This is why you see a lot of people in recent years who are not as satisfied with TV commercial marketing anymore. The commercials I’ve seen are not impressive and follow a formula that simply doesn’t work.
A great example of this is any time a commercial comes on and two big-name celebrities collaborate with a brand and commit to an unfunny comedic bit that lasts 10 seconds. All that says to me is that you thought of the celebrity part first, before the quality of the commercial. If you want marketing collaborations to work, the idea has to be sound and make sense. You can’t just throw something in people’s faces that comes off as big in scope and expect success in the numbers you pull from it.
So let’s run through a few examples of what I mean by that below:
Smelly Brand Crossovers
When you think of a food or beverage brand, smelling like it probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But for some major companies like Hidden Valley Ranch, Velveeta, and Arby’s, as examples (see below), that unexpected idea became a marketing opportunity. They teamed up with fashion and fragrance brands to create signature scents inspired by their products.
These examples don’t exactly scream “I need that” if you’re a customer. It just feels like the brands came together and said, “Why not?”, and that’s not a smart strategy. If these companies believed that they had similar audiences, that would lead them to make decisions around these brand collabs. Just because you might share a similar audience doesn’t mean every idea works on paper.
Great Brand Collaboration and Advice
Have you ever heard the phrase, opposites attract? It’s a psychological way of looking at how romantic relationships are formed between people, but I want to use that to look at great examples of brand collaboration. The differences between one company and another, depending on the industries they are part of, can lead to great potential as long as it works. Some of the examples I mentioned for bad brand collaboration take the wrong approach to it. Let’s take a look at an example that is PERFECT for that approach.
I’ve been a gamer since I was a kid. Over time, every kid changes how they play and what they play on. When I transitioned over to playing on Xbox, I was always met with countless ads for one of Xbox’s biggest ever marketing collaborations.
Mountain Dew has been there to collaborate with them since the original Xbox came out, but then, many years later, in 2013, both Mountain Dew and Doritos collaborated again. The gaming community recognizes it as arguably the most well-known gaming industry marketing collaboration yet. All these years later, and back in 2024-2025, they did another collaboration. An Xbox article was written about it, and the video below shows the great look they created around it.
More than anything, the best thing I can say about what makes for great brand collaboration is that it also incentivizes a reward for the consumer if they choose to buy into it. This Xbox ad gives you a look at that! Marketing departments for all companies would benefit greatly from having reward-based systems folded into their marketing efforts. It doesn’t have to be involved with a brand collab; it would be anything, but brand collaborations are just a bonus to that motto. Reward your customer, and they will reward you.
Lots of Potential for Buffalo Businesses
To conclude, I’d like to highlight another important reason for this blog: showcasing the exciting opportunities for local Buffalo businesses to tap into brand collaboration marketing. Buffalo, WNY, and other surrounding areas are filled with many great businesses, small and large, in a wide range of different industries. I believe there is a great opportunity waiting out there for someone to build their own marketing project with another business.
One of the best examples of a brand collaboration right now in Buffalo is to team up with the city’s sports teams. We have the Bisons for minor league baseball, the Bandits in the National Lacrosse League, the Buffalo Bills for football, and the Buffalo Sabres for hockey. If you watch sports like so many in Buffalo do, you’ll probably notice that the stadiums and arenas are filled with advertisements from companies that partner with the team or the actual arena/stadium itself to bring their products over to sell to fans who attend games.
But let’s say you just want to collab with them on the side without being involved directly in a game; there are many ways you can market around that. These are just a few ideas that I have come up with, and there’s so much more that can be done with great minds coming together to find the best possible avenue of success.
You could see a local chocolate and candy store team up with the Bills to make team-coded chocolates and candies, signed off by Josh Allen himself. You could have a local bar and restaurant team up with the Sabres to offer visits from the players to come by and say hello, and promote it for people to come out more and see games while eating and drinking there. There are several collaborations that they’ve already done below that many people have loved! It doesn’t have to be only the city’s sports teams you collab with; it can be anything you want, as long as it makes sense.
At Bean Media Productions, it’s our goal to make these possibilities happen by speaking to how a local business can find the perfect angle to promote their products through the world of digital marketing, SEO, video production, and so much more. Brand collaboration can utilize all of that for maximum potential. All it takes is one great idea, and you’ll be off and running in no time.
If you are looking for more information on how to build a marketing strategy that includes everything I talked about in this blog, reach out to us! Bean Media Productions has been a staple in marketing for Buffalo and WNY for 20 years. With digital marketing changing quickly every day, don’t hesitate to give us a call to learn more. Reach out through our contact form, and we will be happy to help!