2020 was a year full of surprising collaborations between brands
Since the beginning of 2020, consumers have been forced to rethink the way they interact with brands and make purchases. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, not only has shopping moved to the digital environment, but the entire consumer behavior has changed. .
This transformation has caused fashion brands to rethink how they connect with their consumers and sell. Dealing with a pandemic and having to attend to larger issues, fashion consumption became a distant reality. What's more, consumers, who were mostly working from home, began to focus less on trends and more on convenience. However, they also wanted relief from the constant stream of news about the pandemic and the monotony of being cooped up at home. This made the market ready for fashion brands to try new ways to connect with their consumers using new marketing ideas, outside of their old tried and trusted strategies. And for many, this meant seeking alliances and collaborations with other brands to create new narratives, as well as generate the element of surprise.
Do you prefer to listen? The full podcast about this conversation with Caryn Pang can be found here.
Caryn Pang, an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design and a retail technology consultant, also believes the collaboration offered an opportunity for brands to reinvigorate their employees, especially as issues of race added another layer of anxiety to the pandemic.
“At the core of collaboration is teamwork, which is an important part of the inclusion and accessibility conversation that began in earnest in the spring of 2020,” Ella Pang explains. In this way, collaborations create a sense of inclusion and accessibility that comes from teamwork and can also lead to a much-needed sense of community. “The community creates a sense of belonging and optimism. This real need to belong, coupled with a shared sense of hope, can be attributed to the pandemic and being home for so long, disconnected from others. It is human nature for people to want to be together and collaborate, to create a future together,” she adds.
When it comes to standout collabs in 2020 that managed to infuse real energy into the fashion space, Caryn highlights Gucci and The North Face. She says that: “This collaboration is about accessibility with a playful character and brand story. In addition, it was totally unexpected, especially because of the difference between the prices of the two brands.”
Caryn also refers to other unexpected collaborations, like the one between Kith and BMW, because it crossed the border between industries. “Kith is a very modern and fresh streetwear brand. BMW is an established and well-positioned German luxury brand. This collaboration led to the creation of a real series of M4 Series cars and basically represents trust and acceptance between the two target markets.”
Caryn also explains that: “Another cross-border collaboration was Crocs and Kentucky Fried Chicken. This one was totally fun and quirky putting two chicken legs on Crocs." The consultancy highlights that this collaboration, as well as others that the brand did, helped make Crocs relevant again, especially among young consumers.
Finally, she told us about the Nike and Ben & Jerry's collaboration: “I don't know many shoe and ice cream brands that have collaborated in the past, but aside from the element of surprise, what connects this collaboration is an alignment of social values between the companies. Both have communicated strong messages about equality and both have signed Colin Kaepernick as their spokesperson."
In 2020, the most successful collaborations took a different angle than we had seen in the past, or what was expected. All of them have redefined the potential of brand partnerships and Caryn believes that this year we are very likely to see many exchanges in collaborations. She puts it this way: “We will continue to see a focus on companies that are trying to build more meaningful and authentic relationships between brands and consumers – even if that simply means being fun and not taking it too seriously!”
Photo: official Nike website