No brand is an island

Jack Blog

April 30th, 2015 By Caspar Mason

Brands would love to occupy a special, solitary place in all our hearts. In reality, they’re one part of the mosaic of our daily lives. And as a result, great things can happen when brands work together. It’s often the digital-native companies who get this, and are willing to join forces (or at least release an API) to create something new and useful. Not the ‘slapping a logo on anything that moves’ school of dodgy brand extensions: proper tie-ups that change the brand/user experience for all customers.

[important]Whether a whole new product or a tiny tweak to the service, the best collaborations take away pain points and/or create something new.[/important]

Spotify gets it. Their partnership with Uber helps answer that universal problem, namely ‘Why don’t I have a theme tune?’. Now every cab journey can start with the Rocky theme. Their Shazam link-up is another great one, based on a simple customer understanding: if you like a tune enough to wave your phone in the air in a crowded bar, you’ll almost certainly want to play it again later. Especially if you have no memory of tagging it the next day.

And now Amazon, the big daddy of digital disruptive innovation, has teamed up with Audi who, like the rest of their industry, are considering their place in a changing world of access, sharing and connectivity.

The idea is brilliantly simple: deliveries straight to your car. Tell the driver where your car is, and they’ll use a one-off code to open the boot/trunk (depending on your cultural preference) and voila, your parcel is waiting for you when you’re ready to drive home. It’s a surgical removal of one of the most painful points going: the delivery-day 6-to-12-hour house arrest.

Here’s hoping they’re contractually bound to avoid the mess.