Brand collaboration is an effective way to surprise your clients and to attract new ones.

Brand partnerships not only refresh the brand’s image and introduce new features and characteristics of the brand and its product/service but also this kind of partnerships can be profitable for both participating brands.

Friendships between brands allow them to enter new markets, to reach new targets, to change perceptions or develop their image. And in fact, it’s a real win-win business trend but only when the collaboration is smartly chosen. One of the most recent and interesting brand partnership that surprised me is the Martini Gold by Dolce & Gabbana.

Other pretty successful examples for united brands products and services are: Nike +  iPod as well as The Wall Street Journal + iPad, Ferrari + Marlboro, Blackberry + Starbucks, and Adidas + Star Wars.

According to the branding expert Martin Lindstrom (author of the book BRAND sense)  over 90% of brand alliances fail, half of them because of these 3 reasons:

• there isn’t equal value for the brands in the relationship,
• the brands’ values don’t match each other,
• the strategy isn’t easily understood by consumers.

Lindstrom says that the trick is to find complementary brands, not competing ones. Brands collaboration can be very effective if organized thoughtfully and if both brands’ core values correspond to each other.

If you are interested to read more about brands collaborations, you can check out this useful article: How To Find a Perfect Brand Partnership by Martin Lindstrom in which he advices how to undertake brand collaboration.