How to Create a Viral Brand Collaboration

Cobranded collaborations are hot right now, and they are downright fun. Arguably the more surprising, outlandish, and shocking they are, the more viral they become. What brand doesn’t dream of becoming part of a pop culture movement?

In 2021 Pepsi and Peeps created a marshmallow-flavored soda with just 3,000 units. Crocs created a KFC shoe that looked like fried chicken, and it sold out in 30 minutes.

More recently, Dr. Squatch crashed its website with a limited edition soap bar that contained trace amounts of Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater. Erewhon made $20 smoothies mainstream with its Hailey Bieber collaboration.

The benefits of cobranded collaboration

There are many benefits of doing a cobranded collaboration. Here are four:

1. When a lesser-known brand collaborates with a larger brand, well-perceived brand or an “it-brand,” the lesser-known brand is instantly legitimatized by association.
2. The collaboration introduces your brand to a new audience through the other brand’s marketing, allowing you to reach a larger audience than you would reach on your own.
3. Surprising collaborations give your audience something new to get excited about.
4. Collaborations have the high potential to go viral, with the right (shocking or creative) product or partnership.

Here’s how to execute a collaboration campaign

Once you have found the right brand to partner with, here are three ways to execute a campaign:

1. A collaboration can be as simple as a co-branded giveaway on social media, where you simply give away each company’s products. This is the easiest collaboration to land, as well as to organize and execute. Because so few resources are invested by both parties, there are arguably fewer ways it can go wrong. This type of collaboration has the shortest lifespan, reducing potential impact.

2. If you own a company with physical products, you can send those products to brands or influencers that align with your brand and ask to be featured in their social media and other assets. Many influencers and celebrities require flat payments for placements, or an on-going affiliate commission structure, so this can be a more expensive collaboration.

3. The ultimate partnership is co-branding a product together like Pepsi and Peeps did in 2021. This is a much more complicated relationship, starting typically with a pitch, then a contract, months to years of development and branding, and then execution. This can take extensive resources, which are split between brands as specified in the contract. Because of the time and resources put into these partnerships, they have the greater potential for a big impact, but they also have the potential for more things to go wrong.

Collaboration pitfalls

If you think only positive impacts can come from collaborations, think again. There are many potential pitfalls. Here are a few that come to mind.

• Loss of trust. If you are operating in a niche market with a strong mission and brand standards, it is imperative that your partners share the same ethos. Releasing a product that does not meet your typical ingredient or brand standards for a collaboration can break consumer trust. Your audience will question whether you still care about your mission or if you just care about going viral.
• Potential for high costs. There can be high fees or revenue sharing royalties for usage of the brand or influencer’s name and likeness. Can your company afford to pay those fees?
• Possibility for scandal. You will have an association with the celebrity or brand and everything they stand for. What if they cause a scandal or outrage? Your brand will be associated with it, and everything they say and do, especially while your co-branded campaign is live.
• Virality has a short window. These collaborations rarely stand the test of time, and popularity fades quickly.
• Long lead times. Prepare for potential issues procuring ingredients and supplies from the other brand’s vendors and lengthy approval times for all creative assets.
• Potential for failure. A collaboration that goes viral for being a failed marketing campaign can haunt your brand’s reputation for years. The two most cited failed collaboration attempts are Neiman Marcus and Target, and Lego and Shell. Ask yourself, is all press good press for you and your company?

Make your collaboration successful

At Fontana Candle Company we have leaned heavily into co-branded partnerships, both with influencers in our niche as well as other brands to help propel our growth. These key partnerships have legitimized our position as one of the top candle companies in the wellness industry.

Here are my four tips for successful brand collaborations:

1. Have a contract outlining all costs, ownership, and deliverables.
2. Use scarcity tactics to drive urgency and sales.
3. If the collaboration is successful, can it come back the following year with a different iteration? Tease it early and often. Don’t just launch it and run.
4. Let your creativity shine. The campaign doesn’t have to be wild to be wildly successful.

Our most successful collaboration to-date has been our Honey Lemonade candle with best-selling wellness author and influencer Shawna Holman. We introduced it in 2024 as a one-time, limited-edition candle. With Shawna’s enthusiastic following and our excited customers the first batch sold out in hours.

We brought the candle back this year and it’s our second best-selling scent year to date. It will be back in 2026 for its third year.

Why does this collaboration work for us? Because it is authentic and in line with our mission and audience, making it a genuine collaboration.

Our worst collaboration was when we leaned into a “shock factor” collaboration and launched a sourdough-scented candle. We partnered with a well-known sourdough recipe creator but the scent did not land with her audience. We learned quickly that shock factor collaborations are not what the wellness community wants. We forecasted too strongly and had to discount it heavily to get rid of our stock of this candle.

Collaborations are fun and games—if it’s what your audience wants. If a collaboration lands right, it can go massively viral and put your brand in the center of a pop culture moment. This is the dream of all marketers, right? But if a collaboration goes wrong, it can damage your brand and make your customers question who you really are.

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