The Art of Co-Branding

Posted on May 7, 2013 by ddeal

On May 7, music mogul Jermaine Dupri and I were fortunate to have a byline published in Fast Company concerning four tips for successful co-branding. Co-branding — or sharing your own brand with an outside brand — is an increasingly popular way for celebrities like Justin Timberlake and major corporations such as Budweiser to generate awareness and to promote launches of products and services. The following post contains the unabridged version of our byline in case you’d like to have a bit more context about how my employer iCrossing has successfully built a co-brand with Dupri. Our bottom line: don’t co-brand to create hype. Focus on co-creating value.

To build your brand, sometimes you have to share your brand. And increasingly, big companies like Budweiser and Harley-Davidson choosing to co-brand with celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Kid Rock through relationships that range from sponsoring each other’s activities to the celebrity taking on quasi-roles such as strategic counselor or creative director.

But for co-brands to endure beyond the superficial level of a one-off press release, both parties need to stipulate realistic goals and co-create value. Those are among the lessons iCrossing and Jermaine Dupri have learned through an unusual co-branding relationship that has helped reinvent Dupri’s image as a technology leader, increased membership for his Global 14 social media community, and developed iCrossing’s image as a creative, socially savvy agency.

After forming our relationship in February 2012, within 10 months we boosted membership for Dupri’s Global 14 community by 43 percent, improved Dupri’s Twitter following from 381,000 to 620,000, increased iCrossing’s own Twitter following by more than 40 percent, and, most importantly, gave both iCrossing and Dupri recognition among mainstream influencers.

Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.

Define Realistic Goals

A co-brand starts with an understanding of what you both want out of the relationship before you start working together. And your expectations need to be realistic. In 2011, Madonna and Smirnoff formed the Nightlife Exchange with goals of building digital reach for Smirnoff and generating business for both Madonna and Smirnoff.

SMIRNOFF MADONNA

According to Christopher Swope of Live Nation, the relationship (which featured a special global dance talent search in 2011) has helped Smirnoff achieve double-digit sales growth in key markets (with the help of a specially branded Madonna VIP Access Smirnoff Limited Edition pack) and generate 1.8 billion media impressions. The relationship also helped Madonna make her MDNA tour the highest grossing of 2012. Not bad at all.

The relationship between iCrossing and Jermaine Dupri also started with agreed upon goals and a plan to achieve them. Dupri wanted iCrossing help to drive membership for his Global 14 community, which he launched in 2011 as a platform for young entrepreneurs and musicians to share common interests with himself and each other. He was already a music legend. He also wanted to develop his reputation as a technology and business leader.

iCrossing wanted build our reputation for thought leadership, creativity and social media by tapping into the convergence of entertainment and technology.

But our goals needed to complement each other, too. Had Dupri aspired to increase his visibility among the hip-hop community, he didn’t need iCrossing’s help. But iCrossing could definitely help him drive Global 14 membership through social media and content marketing. Conversely, iCrossing needed to define goals that Dupri was in a position to help iCrossing achieve, such as increasing awareness for our own social media and thought leadership expertise.

Co-Create Value

Co-creating means co-developing products, services, and ideas. U2 and Apple ignited the flame of celebrity/corporate co-creation in 2004, when they collaborated on the launch of the iPod U2 Special Edition, housed in a special black case, and laser-engraved with the signatures of each band member on the back.

As part of their co-brand, Apple and U2 also made U2’s single “Vertigo” exclusively available on iTunes as well as a first-of-its kind digital box set of U2’s catalog. What made the arrangement special was that two icons were sharing their most prized assets to create specially branded products, a model that we’ve often seen emulated, a recent example being Kid Rock and Harley-Davidson agreeing to offer limited-edition, co-branded Rebel Soul merchandise featuring a line coined by Kid Rock: “I can’t hear you over the rumble of my freedom.

Co-creation is at the heart of the iCrossing/Jermaine Dupri partnership, but we’ve taken co-creating a step further by creating original content such as thought leadership about social media, audience insight, and creativity. For instance, we’ve created blog posts together on topics such as business lessons for start-ups and video interviews on creativity and social media. We published a point of view about the secrets of creating engagement on your own social community based on Dupri’s experiences with Global 14. We have also co-written a byline for Fast Company and co-presented about social media and audience intimacy at the 2012 PSFK Conference San Francisco. This thought leadership provides valuable insight to iCrossing clients and helps us meet the goals we defined.

Jermaine Dupri, David Deal: Injecting Community Back Into Social Media from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

By co-creating content, we are both developing a product to support our goals — akin to Justin Timberlake and Budweiser actually making a beer together. Co-created thought leadership is important because content consist of iCrossing’s product given the work we do as an agency.

iCrossing also acts as a co-publisher, relying on our own social spaces to disseminate our ideas and Dupri’s among Fortune 500 influencers — our own clients.

Find Natural Areas of Interest

A hip-hop mogul and a digital agency. The mogul runs a record label. The agency helps companies like Coca-Cola build connected brands. What do they have in common? Well, it didn’t take long to find out. Dupri loves social media and technology; so does iCrossing. Dupri hustles content ranging from his blog posts to Instagram photos. So does iCrossing. We’ve defined a credible intersection of our shared pursuits that makes sense for our brands.

Finding common passions makes for a more authentic relationship. For instance, Dodge Ram and country musician Zac Brown have successfully joined forces around a common interest: community goodwill. In 2010, Ram and Zac Brown launched the Letters for Lyrics partnership to deliver 1 million letters to U.S. soldiers, and in March Brown and Ram joined forces to put up for auction his own Ram truck in order to benefit Camp Southern Ground, which provides programs for children including those with learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. The relationship is no gimmick — Ram has a history of working with country artists to support charitable causes, and Brown founded Camp Southern Ground. Theirs is a relationship centered on a true passion for both brands.

Defining common areas of interest also helps you rule out activities that don’t help us meet our goals. For instance, it does not make a whole lot of sense for iCrossing to promote Dupri’s gigs as a DJ. We are not in the music and artist promotion business. Nor will you find Dupri collaborating with iCrossing on a paid search campaign anytime soon. We’re focused only on the activities that make sense for us both.

Be Committed

One announcement does not make a relationship. A co-brand, like a garden, needs to be nurtured to grow.

Certainly Nike and Michael Jordan created the gold standard for a committed relationship between a company and a superstar individual brand. After launching their relationship in 1984, the two brands embarked on a journey that helped change the way brands and celebrities work together — and a journey that has endured highs (six NBA championships for Jordan) and unexpected turns (such as Jordan’s shocking but temporary retirement from basketball to play professional baseball). Jordan did more than collaborate with Nike on the launch of a line of shoe wear; he literally became a business partner. The Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, helps Jordan earn $80 million annually in retirement. And Nike has obviously benefitted, releasing its 28th shoe in the Jordan franchise in 2013 and commanding 58 percent of the shoe market in the United States according to SportsOneSource.

Jordan and Nike have provided a model for anyone who aspires to create a long-term relationship, including iCrossing and Jermaine Dupri. We have also stayed committed to achieving our goals for more than a year, investing our time and effort to brainstorm on ideas, adjusting our approaches when needed, and refining our messaging as Global 14 has evolved. We focused first on creating content on social media and then more actively brought event appearances into the mix, and we’ve also adapted our story to bring in fresh thinking, such as how a CEO like Jermaine Dupri can become more effective thanks to social media.

Relationships are going to experience occasional hiccups, such as the awkward moment that occurred when it was reported that Alicia Keys uses an iPhone after she signed a co-brand with Blackberry. No relationship is perfect, and you’re both going to need to be open to learning and growing together in order to succeed.

We believe that iCrossing and Jermaine Dupri are creating a model for co-branding because of our focus on creating content together. Stay tuned. We’re just getting warmed up.

How Smirnoff and Madonna Inspired the World to Dance

Posted on April 29, 2013 by ddeal

Co-brands between artists and celebrities are all the rage, as evidenced recently by the launch of Justin Timberlake’s relationship with Budweiser and Alicia Keys’s co-brand with Blackberry. At the Forrester Research Marketing Forum April 19, Christopher Swope of Live Nation provided a case study on how artists and brands can work together to deliver results. His discussion focused on how Madonna and Smirnoff, by tapping into shared passions such as dancing and music, generated 1.8 billion media impressions for Smirnoff and helped Madonna undertake the highest grossing tour of 2012.

As Swope pointed out, brands and musicians actually have a long history of working together, examples being Microsoft using the Rolling Stones’s “Start Me Up” to launch Windows 95 and the collaboration between Apple and U2 to cross-promote U2’s “Vertigo” with a special edition iPod. In the best cases, co-brands meet mutually defined goals, and the relationship between Smirnoff and Madonna was one such success.

The relationship began with a business challenge for Smirnoff: accelerate consumer engagement with the Smirnoff brand on a global level.

“We wanted to find a way to accelerate the growth of the Smirnoff brand and generate engagement,” Swope said. “We wanted to take the brand to the next level and deepen engagement and participation.”

Smirnoff knew its fans are socially savvy. So for Smirnoff, building a brand was less about “let’s sponsor and put our name on it” but rather to generate engagement and deepen relationships with fans.

“When you are giving a dinner party, you worry about the right ingredients — mix of cocktails and people,” he said. “You want to create an experience that deepens relationships. That’s how to think about social.”

Continue reading →

Amnesia Razorfish: sexy, social and successful

Posted on March 5, 2009 by ddeal

Recently Australia-based Amnesia Razorfish (part of the Razorfish global network) won the Adnews interactive agency of the year for the third consecutive year. As a Razorfish employee, I’m happy for my colleagues at Amnesia Razorfish (and of course for our clients, as the award is a reflection on them, too). But I’m equally interested in knowing what the award says about successful marketing in the digital age. What does it take for marketers and agencies working together to succeed year after year? After getting some input from Michael Buckley, Terry Carney, and Iain McDonald of Amnesia Razorfish, I see these ingredients for success emerging:

Make Social Influence Marketing part of your marketing game plan. Social Influence Marketing is a third dimension of marketing alongside direct response and branding. It is here to stay. You don’t need to make an about-face to succeed through social — but you do need employ it intelligently. Example: the Cancer Council Australia is working with Amnesia Razorfish to raise money for the treatment of male cancer. Amnesia Razorfish conceived of Daredallion, a week where people perform dares to raise donations. The effort includes various forms of Social Influence Marketing, including Twitter and a site where you can dare your friends to to perform stunts. Another example: Amnesia Razorfish helped Smirnoff employ Social Influence Marketing to build buzz for the Smirnoff Experience Party. The only way to get tickets to Australia’s biggest free party of 2008 was to go digital. Smirnoff conducted a treasure hunt to give away tickets. To find free tickets distributed across Australia, you had to find clues released through a blog and a Facebook group. The campaign attracted global attention and helped Smirnoff pull off a huge promotional coup. Amnesia Razorfish now employs a full-time Social Influence Marketing staff to help its clients figure out how to embed social into their digital experiences.

Daredallion

Get your hands dirty. An agency must be an active participant in the social world in order to help its clients succeed with Social Influence Marketing. Amnesia Razorfish certainly lives the social values. Its blog is a top-ranked agency blog in Australia, attracting hundreds of thousands of unique views in 2008. Amnesia staff have participated in the Daredallion project cited here and created experimental Twitter applications. Everyone on the senior staff can be found on Twitter. But Amnesia Razorfish is getting its hands dirty in other ways. Amnesia Razorfish wrote Australia’s first Surface application, which recognizes individual business cards when placed on a table and then streams personal social media information from Twitter, Flickr, and other digital properties directly on to the table to be exchanged with someone else (sounds like a new way to exchange phone numbers in a bar). Amnesia Razorfish also built its own in-house video wall purely for the fun of experimentation. Dual projectors stream social content on to the wall, which tracks one’s physical movements.

Be accountable. Amnesia Razorfish measures every single click that end users make. The company uses analytics to be fully accountable for every interaction a person has with a client online. Sometimes improving the consumer experience means more effectively optimizing the performance of a website, not designing a new one. Using optimization tools, Amnesia Razorfish has increased sales by as much as 300 percent for ecommerce clients and increased time spent on clients’ sites by as much as 450 percent. Amnesia Razorfish is also playing with a new tool developed by Razorfish U.S., the Generational Tag, to measure social influence.

Design experiences, not advertisements. What’s the difference? Ads are one-way messages — often great for the analog world, but not sufficient for digital. Experiences engage audiences through interaction. Example: Lynx, produced by Unilever, is a line of male personal care products such as body wash. (In the United States, Lynx is known as Axe.) Amnesia Razorfish won a Webby for helping Unilever build awareness for Lynx through The Lynx Effect. The target audience consists of young men, and the Axe/Lynx brand employs an in-your-face risque approach to connect with them. The Lynx Effect is no exception. Basically the message is this: guys, Lynx will make you more attractive to women. But in the digital world, we convey that message through the experience. To even navigate the site to learn about Lynx products, you select from a choice of provocative looking women. Once inside, you can play amusing games, participate in polls, and download content on to your desktop. (Now we know what “engagement” means Down Under.)

The Lynx Effect

Challenge your clients with ideas that build their businesses. Lipton wanted to build awareness for an amino acid ingredient in Lipton tea — theanine — that stimulates alpha brain waves. The proposition sounded like an educational campaign. But Amnesia Razorfish came up with the idea of imagining Lipton’s product and benefits as a game. Hence, the launch of Brain Train, a series of online games that test one’s mental alertness with subtle brand messaging from Lipton about the power of theanine. Amnesia Razorfish also conceived of an integrated roll-out with radio, print, and outdoor.

Innovation rooted in the big idea is what will spur an economic recovery from the global recession, not better analytics or user experiences (although those things are important, too). In April, leaders of Amnesia Razorfish will join executives from the Razorfish global network to discuss how we can more effectively take big ideas to our clients. We’ve been conducting these summits, which we dub “A Seat at the Table,” since 2007, and each meeting gets better as more participants from outside the United States attend. I can’t wait to see what we’ll learn from each other — better yet, I cannot wait to learn how our clients are benefiting.

Congratulations to Amnesia Razorfish for setting the gold standard.

Smirnoff, Nike, and Lynx embrace Social Influence Marketing

Posted on June 18, 2008 by ddeal

What do a liquor company, sports brand, and a body deodorant have in common?

Smirnoff, Nike, and Lynx are all examples of brands in Asia/Pacific that are working with my employer Avenue A | Razorfish to embrace Social Influence Marketing, or employing social media and social influencers to achieve one’s marketing and business objectives. I recently gathered these and more examples for some research here at Avenue A | Razorfish. The experience opened my eyes to the international phenomenon of Social Influence Marketing. I hope these examples help you think more globally about marketing:

Smirnoff

The Avenue A | Razorfish Sydney office — known in Australia as Amnesia Group — is helping Smirnoff employ social media to build buzz for the Smirnoff Experience Secret Party. According to the Amnesia Group blog, Smirnoff is conducting a “treasure hunt to give away tickets to the Smirnoff Experience Secret Party 2008. Clues are released on a blog to tickets hidden across Australia. There is also a Facebook group which gives help and exclusive clues to ticket hunters. If that’s not enough cyber-fun, there’s also a GPS ticket tracker, which his switched on from time to time.” Want to read more? Check it out here.

Nike

The Avenue A | Razorfish Hong Kong office — known in China as e-Crusade — worked with Nike to create a mobile game that promotes the Nike Air Force One. You can experience more of that here. Two things stand out for me on this one: 1) use of mobile devices and 2) integration with offline.

Nike Women “This Is Love” Facebook Premiere Show Ticket Application

e-Crusade built this application to promote the Nike Women movie, Find Love. Facebookers were encouraged to send Premiere Show Tickets to their friends and show their love for them. The effective use of social media brought more than 4,000 Facebookers to watch the movie online. More details here.

Lynx

Lynx is the name in Australia for the Axe brand of male personal care products manufactured by Unilever. The target audience is the Gen Y male. If you know anything about the Axe/Lynx brand, you know that Unilever employs an in-your-face risqué approach to build brand with young men. Lynx is no exception. Basically the message is this: guys, Lynx will make you more attractive to women. I think this comes through in the Lynx MySpace page.

This is an example of linking Social Influence Marketing to other forms of branding. In addition to creating the MySpace page, Amnesia Group also designed the Lynx Effect, which won a Webby award a few weeks ago. Together the Lynx MySpace page and Lynx Effect website show how a firm can take advantage of the engaging nature of digital (and win a Webby for content that, if created for your personal use, would probably prompt a visit from HR).

In both instances, Lynx sends the same message: our product is all about making you more attractive to women. But in the digital world, you can convey that message through an experience, as evidenced by the games, polls, videos, and other content on the site. What’s more, you can take the experience with you on your mobile phone and download content on to your desk top.

ninemsn

To build brand and usage for ninemsn, Amnesia Group launched the Prize Rush campaign, described again on the Amnesia Group blog: The approach: use a trivia game to generate Live Search queries. More than 4,000 Prize Rush members were recruited across MySpace, Facebook, and ninemsn spaces, creating more than 11,000 posts. More than 68 million search queries were generated in a time span of 8 weeks. I like this one because the campaign met objectives for both marketing (build buzz for ninemsn) and business (generate Live Search queries).

Down the road, I will post Social Influence Marketing examples from Europe. Meantime, I welcome your comments and questions.