There is a box of Oreos on my desk that cost more than my lunch. I did not buy it. A coworker did, as a joke, and then refused to open it, which tells you most of what you need to know about the last two years of marketing.
Supreme x Oreo. Three red cookies, eight dollars at retail, and within a weekend people were listing them online for numbers I will not type, because typing them feels like participating.
I laughed. Then I did what I always do, which is ruin a joke by taking it seriously.
The collaboration is not a stunt anymore. It is a line item. Every brand I have talked to this year wants one, and almost none of them can tell me what it is for.
A collaboration works when two brands trade something neither one could buy. Most of them now are two logos renting each other an audience for a weekend.
The good ones changed the product. Doritos Locos Tacos was not a co-branded wrapper, it was a different taco, and it sold in numbers that embarrassed everybody who called it stupid. Nike and Off-White took a shoe apart and left the seams showing. Target's designer collections gave designers a factory and gave Target taste it did not have on its own. In each case one brand supplied something the other genuinely lacked.
The tired ones change nothing but the print. Same cookie, different sticker. Same hoodie, second logo. The audience gets a scarcity event instead of a product, and scarcity is a stimulant, not a strategy. It works right up until it is the only thing you have.
Here is the part that gets lost in the pitch room, and I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Every collaboration spends equity, it does not generate it. You lend your meaning to somebody else and borrow theirs. If theirs is thinner than yours, you have just paid money to become more generic and called it a moment.
So before the deck gets built, three questions. Does the product actually change? Is either brand risking anything real? And would the other brand's audience be surprised in a way that flatters you?
Salt & Straw passes this constantly, which is why nobody in Portland is tired of it yet. When they partner with a roaster or a farm, the ice cream is different when you eat it. The collaboration is in the spoon, not on the pint.
The audience gets a scarcity event instead of a product, and scarcity is a stimulant, not a strategy.
The Oreos are still sealed. Barnaby has now slept on the box three separate times, which is the highest engagement rate anything on my desk has achieved all quarter.