Brand Partnerships

Veteran screenwriter William Goldman tells a story about a colleague who has an innovative approach to generating plot ideas. He writes a bunch of successful film titles on separate pieces of paper, puts them in a bag and jumbles them up. Then he takes two out at a time, and sees whether he can combine the plots into a new story that will sell. Alas, Goldman never says whether his mixologist ever got a hit this way, but it's a cute anecdote - and it sums up the concept of brand partnership pretty much to perfection.

A good brand partnership is just such a combination. It may not be obvious, it may even be quirky, but on a fundamental level it tells a coherent story that is immediately accessible. There are no real hard and fast rules, but like those titles picked out of the bag, you know it when you see it. A great recent example is the collaboration between Jimmy Choo and Hunter, two brands united by their Britishness, but not a great deal else. Inspired by the fashionability of summer festivals, the new boot keeps the Hunter shape, embossing it with the Jimmy Choo crocodile print, and adding leopard print lining, gold buckle and metal rivets. It's fun, it's surprising, even unlikely, but it works.

Crucially, it has substance. That boot represents what Coleridge would have called a new third thing. It is a genuine and immediately obvious mix of the DNA of both brands, in roughly equal measure, and is something neither could create on their own. Both bring something very different to the party: Jimmy Choo the glamour, Hunter the solidity and tradition. Clearly, both parties have worked hard at making this work, and the result is a great, original product that is very media friendly – you can see how this might pop up again and again throughout the year.

This is the right way to do it. There are all too many examples of the wrong way. It has to be said that many brand collaborations are awful. There are far too many cynical products out there: they simply bolt on a logo or a few brand attributes with minimal input from the partner or vaunted guest designer, for which the consumer is expected to pay a premium. It’s all too obvious when this happens, and with discretionary spend (and editorial space) squeezed, it’s just not good enough any more.

Indeed, you could argue that the recession raises questions over the concept of brand partnerships and extensions generally. By their very nature, they tend to be new, different, brash, fleeting. They tend to flaunt their brand attributes - why else would they exist? - just when consumers are looking for quietness and discretion, to free them from what Ryan Vinelli of Yeshiva University describes in his entertaining paper as ‘Luxury shame: a new cultural norm'. They tend to be products of their time, experimental one-offs that are all but date-stamped, when people now want lasting value, stuff that lasts for multiple seasons - or indeed to buy it in a sale. Crucially, they are extras, on top of what is already out there, just when everyone is reining back. When brands are retrenching to their core values, extensions that cannibalise their sales and stretch their equity are arguably the last thing they need. As Philip Larkin, always a breath of fresh air, said of Dockery and Son: Why did he think adding meant increase?/To me it was dilution. Where do these/Innate assumptions come from?

After all, timing is everything, as Chanel demonstrated in spectacular style last year when its Mobile Art exhibition hit the buffers in New York. Even if you know the story, it bears repeating. It was a hell of a show, conceived by Karl Lagerfeld himself and the starchitect cum art-designer Zaha Hadid, to promote Chanel's 2.55 bag. The ultimate art/fashion mashup, it featured artwork from 20 artists including Daniel Buren, Sylvie Fleury, Yoko Ono and Wim Delvoye, displayed in a high-tech pavilion designed by Hadid. All this right after Lehmans blew up, right on their doorstep. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic at The New York Times, hit the nail on the head: ‘If devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional.’ All of those components were hotter than a pistol barely yesterday. Now it seems like another era; like fin de siècle insanity.

And yet of course brand partnerships remain tempting, and they’re not likely to go away any time soon. Walpole’s Guy Salter in a recent piece on this subject for Luxury Society (now there’s an interesting story), neatly summarises the list what they can achieve ‘from increasing revenue, raising profile, reaching a wider audience, test-marketing a new product category, providing an injection of creativity — or a combination of many of the above.’ They can also be an enormous help in reinvigorating, repositioning, launching or relaunching a brand – the Jimmy Choo boot had a wider role to play in the hipper rebranding of Hunter, for example. And of course they don’t have to be brash or flash or otherwise inappropriate – far from it. Many of the partnerships we’re seeing now were probably on the stocks back before the world imploded. It will be interesting to see what comes next. One to watch perhaps is Edun, the fair-trade clothing brand set up by Bono and his wife Ali Hewson, some 50 per cent of which has just been acquired by LVMH. Now there’s a timely brand partner in waiting.