Insights Everywhere #009: Alex Shapiro

Have we reached Peak ‘Brand Collab?

The future of brand collaboration.

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Summary

In this episode, brand strategist Alexander Shapiro discusses the evolving landscape of brand collaborations, particularly with celebrities. He explores the risks and rewards of such partnerships, citing examples of both successful and unsuccessful collaborations. Shapiro emphasizes the importance of strategic thinking in creating long-term, profitable collaborations that resonate with consumers. He also critiques recent high-profile collaborations, offering insights into what makes a partnership effective and sustainable.

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Takeaways

• Celebrity collaborations can be high risk and high cost.
• Many collaborations are driven by laziness rather than strategic thinking.
• Successful collaborations often have a long-term focus and deep connections.
• Brands need to prioritize cash flow over mere engagement metrics.
• Survivorship bias can skew perceptions of collaboration success.
• It's essential to treat collaborations as business transactions.
• Brands should engage loyal customers in the collaboration process.
• Effective collaborations should enhance product value and brand authenticity.
• Avoid superficial partnerships that lack genuine connection.
• Strategic frameworks are crucial for evaluating collaboration success.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to the latest episode of Insights Everywhere, where folks from our worldwide network of smart collaborators share their unique perspectives and experiences from the world of brand design, marketing, transformation. Today we're talking to our friend, Frankfurt-based brand strategist, Alex Shapiro. Alex, tell us about yourself.

Hey David, thanks so much for having me here. I always enjoy speaking to you and getting your amazing insights. I'm born and raised in New York City, so I was constantly around brands, especially fashion brands. I worked originally in investment banking in New York City - before I left the industry to work in telecoms, especially data communications, and came over to Europe to work with phone companies and solutions providers.

And eventually, after I got, I guess, somewhat disappointed by missed opportunities from telecom providers like Deutsche Telekom or others, I moved over into advertising and started working with a German agency called Springer and Jacoby and then found that advertising and digital were mashing up together and started working for people like Accenture and IBM and then moved to China where digital is obviously at an amazing level and where brands are also have incredible connections. So now I'm back here in Germany dealing with some of the aftermaths and the messes as well as some of the successes.

Okay, thanks. Great to have you here. We talk quite a bit, but our conversations normally tend to steer towards celebrity brand collaborations, which I know is a hotspot, passion point of yours. ⁓ And I guess what I'd like to talk about today is a proposition. There's lots of them. They've been in the news recently. Have we reached peak collab? What do you think?

Yeah, no, I think collapse remind me a lot of like M&A transactions. So mergers and acquisitions are looked at by the investment banking industry and by numerous consultancy studies that are around 80 % of all acquisitions don't work. And don't work means that it was, it was a bad investment. Didn't generate returns. I think we're probably at a similar rate now for collabs. So I think collabs are usually high risk, often high cost, especially when they're done with celebrities. So you might want to have a portfolio of collabs, but I think in general, people are leaning into collabs because they're easy to do. They very often have limited product launch numbers. So if you make 50 or 60 of a limited edition product, it becomes a desirable item just because of its scarcity, even if it doesn't generate brand value. So I think in most of the cases now we're seeing an over exuberance and collapse, just like we have seen in the M&A market and often over exuberance for acquisitions. And this of course raises prices and makes proper returns difficult.

So if that's the case, why are we seeing so many of them?

Well, I think one of my favorite excuses for most things that happened over, think, the last 10 years that don't seem to make any sense is just straight up laziness. mean, collabs are a lot of fun to do. They're really easy to do. They're easy to convince your board of directors, wow, we're going to do something with this A-list celeb who you'd like to have lunch with anyway. ⁓

You can always do the other favorite childish response, is, but mommy, mommy, all the other kids are doing it. I think that there have been some really great examples of collapse, especially 10, 15, 20 years ago, and even over the last five years that have done really well, just like there's been some acquisitions that have been brilliant. ⁓ and they get held up as shining stars because just like M&A advisors, collab advisors are out there and they're pushing the good cases and not really mentioning the bad cases.

Okay, so it's kind of survivorship bias.

Yeah, definitely. Perfect turn.

So - what are some of the ones that have worked well in the last five years, let's say?

I think if I go back a little bit more, if I can, because there's one that I wanted to talk a little bit about today, which everybody sort of forgets was a collab, which was Intel. When we saw Intel inside, so when we were buying laptops from brands that we weren't so sure about, like Dell back in the day, ⁓ or Acer, or some of the up and coming other Asian brands, we said, yeah, but it's got an Intel chip inside. Must be pretty good. Brilliant collab.

It helped both sides. Intel was once a superstar. Now, of course, because it's missed out on AI, it's gone the other way. Another one which I like, which again, I think often gets forgotten, is Vibram, the Souls.

So when we put Vibram Soles on very often elegant or more upscale or brand-driven shoes, it sort of makes us believe that these are high-quality shoes. These are shoes we can wear every day that they'll last. And Vibram now has worked with numerous different brands and has a very clear ingredient like Intel for performance for how it can enhance certain companies that need that legitimation of that performance. Another one which is...

I am not familiar… is that an ingredient brand like Gore-Tex?

Yeah, it's like Gore-Tex - a perfect example. Vibram is a sole and it's been used by Puma, Nike, Adidas. It's been used by top luxury fashion brands and it was used by Prada back in the day. And it just sort of says this sole will last and Vibram souls are fairly expensive. So it gives you that nice uptick and it was tremendously successful for quite some time. I think another one, is, was really important, which people also forget about was the collab, which included also a big investment between Microsoft and OpenAI. And when Microsoft sort of said, we're okay with AI and pushed heavily and started increasing the products, it did really well. now of course, Microsoft is leader in the industry because of the collapse. It didn't invent AI. It was somewhat late to the game, but it did the right kind of a collab with the leader and it picked the right horse.

Super great.

Another one, which is a little bit older and I'll come up to some more, some more recent ones was obviously Nike and Michael Jordan. And the key thing here was not just that his Airness is amazing, but it's the length of that collab. How long, how deep, how much they invested. So when we think of Michael Jordan and Nike, it's totally authentic. It's totally legitimate. We can't even separate the two, even though they're clearly very different individuals and organizations. And Mike has had some problems over the years, but somehow that commitment has allowed them to stay together. I think that's in stark contracts with Nike and politics. So I think Nike has good politics. think the way in which they express those politics, whether it's racial issues, sexual issues, etc., is very heavy handed, very heavy on communications, not heavy on product, not heavy on doing in the community, not heavy on customer show. Lots of celebs, lots of big statements, lots of flashy ads, but not a lot of doing on the ground. As opposed to ⁓ something like Ralph Lauren that worked with Wimbledon really well and has worked with them for years, focused on the ball boys and ball girls, moved out, very believable, very consistent. think a newer one like Levi's and Beyonce, again, products connected.

Her album, Cowboy Carter. Full of denim, full of Levi's. Interesting her roots in Texas, which one, even though Levi's is a California based company, still has a lot of that cowboy kind of culture, a lot of consistency. Denim is back now, especially baggy denim. She's a big woman. So think that also helps a lot in terms of how they position the brand. Really, really, really spot on.

Another one I love is Nespresso and George Clooney. Again, years and years. In the beginning, it felt a little tenuous, but when we start to think about him, his connections to his own Mezcal brand, to food, to travel, to Italy, where he also lives part of the year with his wife, there's a lot of deep roots in it. And the more you think about it, the more they committed it worked. Some of the more recent ones would be things like crypto and betting apps, which did a lot of work with celebrities, branding stadiums. These are tremendously wealthy organizations that used their wealth to solidify the legitimacy with people like Larry David, who did work with cryptocurrencies and other A-list superstars that were able. Some of them also got into some problems like Brady, the quarterback.

Or, Floyd Mayweather

Yeah. So there was, again, I think, you know, some of the collabs was with stars were a good idea. I think that obviously they went at times too far, but I think crypto betting apps, despite their difficult moral positioning, I think have been able to boost their revenues and their profits by working with sponsorships of a very high value.

from a more down to earth perspective, think Hermes and Equestrian or the use of horses, horse racing, very, very specific and focus has been brilliant. A lot of other brands have tried to work with Equestrian arts, but it's very, very hard. It's a very unique group. think even back in the day, Rolex with golf really hit it because they stuck with it.

Golf is a very elite sport. It's a bit on the boring side to watch, but if you're a golf player, you love it. And I think that kind of mechanism exactitude, which is part of Rolex watches, or at least should be, connects with golf a lot. And when I think now for they're moving into tennis into other sports seems a lot less believable, especially into the crowd at Formula One. LV did a partnership with Abloh from LV back in the day where they did a G wagon together, very focused. He really put in the time and effort. It really felt like he built that G wagon together with them. And some of the more recent work by LV and Mercedes seems so superficial in comparison. And I think the last one I wanted to quickly mention, because I'm going to do some Gucci bashing. It's kind of easy with their revenues and profits falling so much. But Gucci did a collab with North Face that was brilliant way back in the day when before a lot of the luxury brands started going into fitness and it was beautiful colors. North Face had a quality product, especially about five years ago. And I think they really leaned into each other's strengths and had a quality to it. The models they use it had a sort of a technical yet fun.

So outdoor yet fashionable. was fresh when they did it at the time. Now we're overloaded with all of these kinds of sort of, luxury and outdoor. think L'Oreal and Aum did a pretty good job, even though it's a bit at the end and now it's just way too much. Like the Timberland Gucci, sorry, the Timberland LV collab that was pushed by Pharrell because of his roots for me felt particularly fake. And of course did itself very well.

Got it. So before we get onto the Gucci bashing, you just gave a long list of collabs, some of which were B2B partnerships more than celebrity collabs. I might infer here that if you're a brand and you venture to a partnership with a celebrity, you have to treat it like a business win-win transaction or relationship.

Yeah, that would be nice. I mean, I think this is obviously the issue where people are saying, I need to juice my numbers. I want to get at my engagement rates. I want to get some headlines. I want to get out there. I want to be seen. Poppi and again, I think that's okay when you're emerging brand. had, you and I talked earlier about Poppi or about some of the newer brands that have come out, out into the market that need to be seen that have a recognition rate below 20%. But I think when you're a big established brand.

You're just going to confuse your customers. You might catch their attention. You might make them smile, but are you really going to help them to pick a product when they're inside of that sales journey? Is it going to make them buy? Is it going to make them buy full price instead of discount? I think then it becomes a lot, lot, lot more difficult and people aren't thinking about it. They're just saying, wow, look at the cool engagement rates we got. We got a spike in visits to our social media page. Ta-da. But that's, that's no longer. Okay. That doesn't work anymore.

That was okay 10 years ago, not now.

So you need a more strategic approach.

Yeah, make money. mean, it's got to make money. That's why we do marketing. mean, I love brand value and brand value helps pricing helps margins long-term. I mean, it's not a touchy feely game of recognition that right now, especially in 2025, when brands are so much part of people's lives, they want to see something concrete. Brands have to drive cash flows, not just revenues or not just engagement.

Got it. So which ones in your view have really missed the mark in the last few years?

Yeah. So I think I mentioned this earlier. think Nike and where they work with politics, just confused people. Nike's revenues have fallen apart and it's always easy to blame the marketplace, but at the same time, Adidas revenues have been doing pretty well. So this is one of the reasons why I really enjoy talking with you, David, and working with Studio Everywhere. It's this sort of critical approach.

Right? So yes, this is a good tool, but how exactly do we use the tool as everything? Not just yay, collab, yay, let's do one, pay us for them, but really trying to find a way to create a logical, long-term profitable collab, which not only helps the client, but also helps the relationship between studio everywhere and the client. So yeah, Nike, you know, the results have just been terrible for the last two or three years.

And largely that is because of confusion with consumers. They're going to other brands, right? On running Adidas, New Balance, especially much more focused, much more clear. Nike's all over the place and their connection to all different kinds of politics. It's not even like they picked one issue like Black Lives Matter. They are all over the map. I'm confused. I don't even know what Nike stands for anymore. ⁓ One which could have worked, you know, because we talked about Adidas being focused with partners. Adidas really leaned into Beyonce.

They created an own brand for her, right? That's a real partnership that we could give her revenue splits, but it turned out to be Ivy Park. It didn't really have roots in sports. It didn't really have roots in performance. It was sloppy and all over the place. Good intention, good strategy, horrible execution. ⁓ I think the same thing is true with Gucci when they did a fashion show on Hollywood Boulevard.

So walking on the streets. I've seen other street based or outdoor based fashion shows that really worked. It looked washed out.

It's not a particularly important street. It's not even a particularly important street to Hollywood. Too many different movie stars. felt like the creative director, Alessandra was just picking his friends, which is always a bad thing. didn't feel authentic or genuine. And it ended up with a partnership with Disney, which in my mind just crushed the brand. I really don't want to see Minnie and Mickey Mouse with Gucci. And especially not when it's not done in a smart and creative or Snow White with Gucci. It just felt sort of, retread boring. And then of course it ended up with Gucci and Adidas, should have worked, right? Except they focused on the Samba. There was no real sport bits. The products that came out were so, they had such minor alterations. It was a shame because the fitness market was taking off. And this was also at a period when Adidas was having difficulties and it just fell flat. People didn't, there was no real need to buy one thousand Euro Sambas.

It, think in the end of the day, did pretty good for Adidas - sort of brought them up, brought them up in the price points and the credits, and they would later raise the prices. Well, Gucci just washed out. think after LV did a pretty good job with, with Fortnite in the beginning and then washed out when it went into the metaverse. Also with the Olympics, huge expenditures, lots of exposure revenues collapsed during that period. So I can't see what the Olympics and that gigantic expenditure did for LV, but

crash their margins and crash their revenues. Same thing with the, you can see the fall of LV completely connected to Pharrell. Why he's working with the creator of Bathing Ape, other than they've been friends for 30 years, just like he's been friends with Jay-Z for an extended period of time. Doesn't make any sense to me. Sort of a similar sort of strange old romantic view between  Boss and Beckham, David Beckham with their collection, recent quarters for Boss, terrible revenues, falling margins, everything is flat, doing nothing. They spent so much money in the Boss Beckham relationship, it should really be pulling up all the revenues and performance of the company. Should be like a sugar rush, but it's not there.

And I think what's really sad is that Beckham did amazing things. don't know if you remember with H&M - totally believable, like a road trip with an RV. But yeah, that just seems sad. Canada Goose also had problems with its revenue.

They started working with Hader Ackerman, who's also at the same time, the creative director of Tom Ford. So he's Canada goose and Tom Ford. Tom Ford is totally above Canada goose. Hasn't done anything. They renamed it Snow Goose because we need another brand, which I don't understand. And unlike Ivy park, it just didn't even have that differentiation or separation to have a chance. as we saw much more with sort of like a North face or a Gucci working much better. This just felt flat. Was to be trying to be fashionable, but totally faded out.

And I think the last tale, if you can remember a couple of years ago, is how everybody piled into the metaverse, how everybody got burnt and nobody talked about it and nobody learned about it. And I think there again, it's stop chasing things you don't understand and stop crowding into it. feels like, you know, when everybody starts investing in a tech stock.

sort of crowd into it. I understand that kind of a momentum trade. I don't understand it with branding because the things that I've also loved talking with you about David and working with Studio Everywhere is this idea of differentiation, especially in these categories that are highly emotional. need to be separate, different. And again, the companies like Hermes whose revenues are skyrocketing, moving up consistently compared to LVMH group brands are carrying brands. think the same thing can be said for Bruno Cucinelli and some of the other brands out there that are keeping it focused added us, as I just mentioned, also doing much better that the brands that don't overcollab that keep it focused on their customers from products just outperforming these days.

And the results are very clear. Ralph Lauren, for example, also very, very clear focus, very, very clear efforts. Their revenues are taken off as opposed to brands like Calvin Klein that are getting spattered or scattered.

So if we just sort of decode, there's a long list there of collabs that could have tried harder, I guess, or could have worked better. We could decode the symptoms of why that was overall. Could we create some kind of framework or rubric or checklist for ways they could make it work?

Yeah. Again, I think it's a strategic decision to do a collab, right? Just the same way it's a strategic decision to have friends, to join a club, to join a political party. It's a very serious decision, right? So I judge people just the way I judge brands by who they're associated with. So again, working with an organization like Studio Everywhere, you can set those strategic frameworks.

Look at a return on investment. Learn from it. We talked earlier, just like M&A transactions, you should have a portfolio of collabs you should compare. You should quickly end the collabs that aren't working and then lean into the ones that are. And if something is working like Ralph Lauren and Wimbledon, lean into it. Make it a long year relationship, right? And espresso cloning many, many years. So I think this is the issue is have a portfolio, clear framework for how to judge and execute. And then go forward.

This isn't going to take away from the fun that collabs can do the spontaneity. mean, there are clubs out there that I love that suddenly just work. That make me smile. That make me laugh. And there's others that just feel really, really tired. So one of things I like about collabs, like we saw with Intel or Vibram that I mentioned, or some of the other like Gore-Tex, et cetera, these kinds of ingredients is they've allowed companies to raise prices. Right? So Adidas, when they worked with Gucci, suddenly Samba's worth a thousand euros.

Hmm.

Right. That makes sense for Adidas, but for Gucci, it really make sense? Suddenly there was a cheap product out there. Adidas was collabing with a lot of other fashion brands. So it kind of got washed out. ⁓ and I think in the end of the day, if you do it properly, a collab should reduce your media costs. Right. So if you do decide, we know that Kim Kardashian does a lot of collabs show by agreeing to pay her fee to be part of your collab, should reduce.

what it would have cost to reach a specific audience. We talked about often in the past, Kylie Jenner, who's worked with brands, she's working now with Prada. See if that makes sense. That feels a little bit on the weird side. Prada's already fairly well known. Why would you do that collab? So I think those are important issues. And again, that differentiation we talked about, Kith and ADL are, I may, Celine, Dior are brands that have a very funky, different design focus and are often collaborated with brands like a New Balance, for example has had a tremendous ⁓ collaboration with Aimé Leon Dore to push them into a more sort of street vibe feel.

And I think that can work. But again, I think you need to work with an external party like a studio to determine how much of it is personal preference and how much of his market preference talk to your customers. don't understand why people don't go online and say, hey, guys, we're looking at these three collabs with these three luxury brands. Which one do you think work? So make it more of an interaction with your customer, something fun.

And if you vote and participate, you can be one of the people that gets one of the limited edition products. And I think that's the other issue too, is who gets a limited edition products that's often influencers. It doesn't feel like part of the customers.

And so the collabs, instead of being something you reward a loyal customer with, becomes something that you use just to get hype and people feel left out. I think that's happened a lot with a lot of the Nike drops over the years. It sort of felt like this strains elite community. Things were set on resell at very high prices and that doesn't feel particularly smart - or long-term oriented.

You see a lot of that here in Hong Kong with queues around the block on drop day and stuff.

Yeah. I don't think it works for certain products with certain brands, but also over a period of time when you keep doing it and I can never seem to get these cool new products. have to settle for the same old, same old. And if I wanted the cool new product, it's not just the price didn't go from 150 to 300 on the resale market goes from 300 to 900. How does that help things?

I think it's interesting that Taylor Swift actually went after the resellers of her own tickets market, even though her tickets are expensive enough, even though her merchandise is expensive enough, she sort of signaled to her fan base, hey guys, these people that are reselling, it's not good for me, it's not good for you. And I think that's been very different sort of in the fashion collab space where they say, look, it justified our collab, something which, you know, was double the price of our normal product is now six times. Doesn't that make you feel great? And I don't think that makes the end consumer feel great. I think that's fun for the fashion community ⁓ or the influencer community, but not, for the real customer base. makes them feel alienated.

Definitely. So we started talking last week about potential alternative playbook for making collabs or new ways to grow work. So one spring to mind was using your loyal customers to launch new products, not celebrities. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I love that. think now that social commerce, especially with China as an example, Hong Kong as well, Singapore, where you see people coming together to buy products, even the Daigou market where people were coming together, grouping their purchases and sending a friend to Korea or to the US or to a market where prices were cheaper to buy for you. think now there's an opportunity to turn to your customers and say, we really want to take these risks with new products.

There's something really cool we want to do. We want to work with an unknown designer. We want to work with a lesser known brand. What do you guys think? Because if we can pre-order or advance purchase, we can make sure that the quantities are appropriate. So all of our loyal customers get access to it.

And more importantly, we got a nice CO2 reduction twist to it where we can say, if we produce to demand, then we won't overproduce, which means we'll lower our CO2. And I think this is a really interesting shift where it used to be create demand, create desire.

and then push production into it. Now, because of all the amazing stuff we can do with AI and with digital interactive communities, we can start asking people, hey guys, what do you want? Tell us what you want. Who should we be collaborating with? So it all of a sudden becomes we products, our products. And I think for brands that don't own their manufacturing.

This is really important. I think for a brand, obviously like Hermes that owns its manufacturing, that does most of its production in-house, it can sort of bring things out. think you've seen brands like Barber that can focus on quality. ⁓ you look at brands like, some of the fine British men's shoe companies that are still producing by hand in the UK or Italian artists, artisanal oriented brands, they can focus more on their products. But if you don't own your own production, you've got to improve the relationship with the customers, get to know them better.

And stop this kind of superficial collab activities because in the end of the day do we really need another New York Yankees symbol on something that has nothing to do with baseball.

Tell me more, that sounds like a personal passion point.

Yeah, I'm from Manhattan, so I'm a New York Mets fan. So we're the guys that are the blue with the orange NY logo. And of course, the Yankees are the black and white. And the Yankees were the old school darling ⁓ of New York. It's an old tradition with Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. And the Mets were invented in the late sixties and we're a newcomer to baseball, sort of an underdog team. And I'm from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and we're a Mets neighborhood.

There are other neighborhoods like the East Side of Manhattan or South Bronx, for example, or I would say Brooklyn, which is much more of a Yankees area, while Queens, Staten Island, more of a Mets area. So it's very sort of regional, very similar to sort of British football clubs. So whether you're Chelsea or Arsenal, it's a big deal and has a lot to do with your neighborhood. So I'm very much of a proud New York Mets fan. Every time I see a New York Yankees hat, I just get enraged. know, like, those are the bad guys. Those are the guys we want to beat. And to see that logo get used over and over again, where it suddenly no longer became the symbol of a baseball team, or even somebody like Jay-Z who says he made it more famous. So was then suddenly about hip hop and now it's suddenly about tourism.

And then it's suddenly about Gucci. So it's one of these sort of brands and collabs that again, it's the difference between being a tourist and being a fan. And if you want to be a tourist, do a superficial collab and slap the New York Yankees on it. Because for me, New York Yankees now equals tourists. If you want to be authentic, do something with the New York Mets. So I think that's always a sort of issue of don't be a tourist. And I think that's sort of an interesting issue for when you want to do a good collab, make sure that there is a connection that's deep into the product that can increase your value, help you increase your pricing and help you lower your media costs. Not just suddenly splash out because everybody recognizes it, but nobody will remember it.

So this talk of tribalism, polarization, America, my blue shirt, brings us onto the hottest collab of last week, two weeks ago, that the whole internet is arguing about: American Eagle with Sydney Sweeney. What do you think of that?

Well, American Eagle underperformed for the last three years. So they've had pretty much flat revenues. ⁓ Branding hasn't been very good. Marketing team isn't particularly respected. mean, we saw Levi's coming back, eating up their market share, Abercrombie and Fitch. Amazing performance over the last three years.

Ever increasing profits, super expanding margins, and those are their key competitors. So American Eagle has sort of been flat. They had their moment in the sun when they were growing, but right now the brand's fairly dead. So I get wanting to do something splashy and I will definitely give them props for getting a lot of attention by using Sydney Sweeney. And the difficulty for me is that it's a complete rip from the Calvin Klein Brooke Shields ad, which when you look at is brilliant. And she goes to explain what genes are and what DNA is and why you look at her and is like this goddess. She's a freak of nature. She's so beautiful and elegant at the same time. You're like, wow. So if there's an elegance and an intelligence and irony that's there with American Eagle, again, we're in a period where social media is making us all, whether we like it or not, a bit stupider.

Right? We've all sort of gotten a bit more into our, into our scrolls and streams. And so she's known as a sex bomb. we're like American ego sex bomb, you know, and sex bombs are sex bombs because of their genes, which felt a little bit obvious, but again, maybe that was appropriate.

I didn't like that they didn't sort of add better creative direction and art direction. think she's been on SNL and she's done a lot of ironic things. It really felt very much like run at the wall kind of advertising, very clear and obvious. But then again, I think what we're ultimately going to see is next quarter revenues and a quarter after that. Right. So Levi's also had huge problems two or three years ago. The kind of collapse they're doing now is working. Right. We'll see if this works.

In the end of the day, the margins are going to go up. They're to be selling less products with discounts or not. Donald Trump stepped in, which is insane because there was this political battle stepped in to support her saying she's a Republican from Florida and she loves to fire guns. And now they have videos of her shooting guns. Now this is an urban middle-class women's brand. Now, if this drives the revenue,

I'm just going to be like, wow. But again, there's a lot of danger signals here. The stock goes up and down. We're not sure. Was this something where the brand fell into this? I don't think they knew what was going to hit them. I don't think this was a particularly intelligent idea. This is regurgitating some, this is basically you and I have talked about this before. This is just straight up stealing, but then not even adding something to it. Sort of watering down the original CK advertisement, which had a beautiful, simple creative direction here with this sort of strange cars and behind the scene. mean, they just jumped so much different content into it. It also felt a bit strange, but we'll see. I mean, I wish them the best. They certainly need it. Their shares are way down. This seems to be bringing some life. ⁓ Yeah, but again, proof's in the pudding. Let's see what happens.

Time will tell, it always does. So we're running out of time. So if we were to end on, I don't know, three principles building long-term profitable collaborations between brands and brands or brands and celebrities, what would your top three principles be?

Well, I think you should develop a portfolio of collabs, right? If you're to go that way, if you're going to use external promotion partners, right? They're not coming from within your company, then create a portfolio, talk to studio, everywhere. think you need to set those benchmarks, set aside some funding that can be redistributed or reallocated based on what's work. If.

You don't need short-term results or the sugar rush of engagement from an external celebrity that has a big following. Then I would follow what you had mentioned earlier, which is look at your customers. Collaborate or cooperate with existing loyal customers, right? There are companies like Tiffany's, Porsche that have such amazing customers, even Rolex. I think their customers are more interesting than almost anything else. They've already formed themselves into communities. There are Porsche driving clubs. Tiffany's is an essential part of family gatherings like weddings, or they make trophies for Wimbledon or for the NBA to sort of go deep into those communities, find out true heroes, and then elevate those heroes by using them as spokespeople instead of necessarily celebrities. And I think the last thing is try to go back to those things like with Intel that we both discussed, find a collab partner that really helps your product, right? That really brings them. And I think that's one of the interesting things with JW Anderson and what he did at Loewe, what he hopefully can do at Dior is finding clever ways to mash up or bring together different product expertise, production capabilities - different kinds of materials. And I think now people are just kind of burnt out. There's a whole issue of trust, right? What's real, what's fake. And that again, what worked as a collab 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I think now take your time, right?

Work with an external partner, find something, talk to your customers, really like carefully brew it instead of saying, hey, Sydney Sweeney is the hot woman. Let's jump on board. And don't forget, Sydney Sweeney has done already over 20 collabs. Why are you getting involved with somebody so late while some of the better collabs were done with people or with brands that people didn't know about yet? So I think there's a huge issue of surprise, authenticity, really great brands that are emotional brands surprise you.

So I love that surprise factor. That's something that I think, David, your company has been able to do is really create surprising, refreshing experiences for consumers and a collab could do that but let's really be honest is this really a surprise?

Thanks Alex, lots to think about there. Here's to many more collabs with you. Thanks for your insights. Cheers, speak soon.

Yeah, David, thanks a lot. Thanks for the time. It was a pleasure.

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Keywords

brand strategy, celebrity collaborations, marketing, brand partnerships, consumer engagement, brand value, collaboration success, marketing trends, brand differentiation, strategic partnerships

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