From Partnerships to Pop-Ups: What Experiential Offers Brands
- Molly Phillips
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Brand partnerships and pop-up experiences: in an attention economy these are two concepts that are bound to get you talked about.
Why?
Because experiential marketing gets you noticed, and a collab can extend that reach.
Partnership pop-ups are marketing masterclasses. They can tell us a lot about what people in this experience economy actually want to see.
So, with that in mind, let’s dive a little deeper.
The Benefits of Brand Partnerships
Collaborations are surging in popularity.
Whether it’s a brand collaborating with an influencer, or whether it’s two brands joining forces to create a single event or experience: that extra pair of hands makes all the difference.
Partnerships are a helpful subcategory in marketing. As acquisition costs rise, as people’s attention spans are hounded, as people wonder where to place their hard-earned cash, it definitely can’t hurt to have:
Twice the potential audience members
Twice the budget
Twice the reach for a single campaign.
The Benefits of Pop-ups and Experiential Marketing
Pop-ups and brand experiences have a lot of benefits in the attention economy:
FOMO sells – the temporary nature of pop-up experiences makes them feel more exciting, and drives people to get involved while they can. Scarcity and a sense of time-pressure cannot be understated!
The Digital Side of Things – a well-designed, creative, and visually-appealing experience is just SO social media-compatible. A pop-up has a lifetime beyond the immediate vicinity of the visiting hours. It’ll exist in the hashtags of the digital landscape for weeks to come, improving its Return on Investment, and the reach of the event.
A Great Opportunity to Connect – not only with your audience, who will benefit from the sense of personalisation and community in an increasingly digital world. It’s also an opportunity to connect with brands like your own, to establish your place in a busy market, and assert your brand messaging.
That’s why pop-ups and brand partnerships so often go hand-in-hand.
Pop-up Brand Partnerships: Exciting Examples
In the last few weeks, the coffee brand Grind has teamed up with the publishing giant, Penguin Random House, for a pop-up experience that combined their two specialities.
They took a Grind-pink and Penguin-orange minibus around UK university campuses. There, they offered free iced coffee to an audience of students on their exam breaks.
Like that, they were able to achieve the objective of advertising Grind’s menu of unique coffee and launching their Spanish Latte and Strawberry Matcha specials. These came in limited edition Grind x Penguin branded cups.
At the same time, they offered students QR codes that unlocked Penguin’s audiobook selections.
This partnership pop-up worked so well for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it’s a partnership that makes sense. Coffee and books: the two go together so nicely. A nice coffee and a gripping page-turner are a well-worn match.
Secondly, they fit together within the campaign, which framed the pairing as reading with your hands free to enjoy a coffee.
The pop-up was well-targeted to make use of an existing audience: university students, who, generally speaking, like coffee and reading.
Famously, this is a demographic who benefit from FREE STUFF and use their phones a lot. That meant a lot of exposure on social media for both brands.
They even targeted their product even further, by offering iced coffee – playing to the strengths of a group primarily made up of Gen Z and Millennials who just adore an iced coffee.
The pizza chain, Papa Johns, has teamed up with Pixar to offer immersive pop-up experiences across the world.
The pizza arcades will celebrate Pixar’s release of Toy Story 5. There will be limited-edition pizzas, themed menus, and gamification. People in the US, UK, South Korea, and Spain will be able to enjoy this trip down memory lane.
Why does this partnership work so well?
Again, these are two brands who share similar audiences and are often enjoyed in similar settings. That means that this partnership makes use of the audiences already in existence, so that the pop-ups extend the reach as wide as it will go.
The experience itself also hops on a marketing trend: it’s a prime example of nostalgia marketing. Nostalgia marketing is having its moment because of the emphasis on connection with real human emotion when conducting a campaign. Nostalgia makes your brand more memorable, improves recall, and can even increase trust in your product.
And, of course, who doesn’t love pizza? Fact.
A pop-up in Paris saw Nike and SKIMS combined label make its public debut.
They used the event to launch their new collection of activewear which was inspired by ballerina aesthetics.
It was a temporary retail space that made good use of the combined audience that they have cultivated through their product partnership. With a slick beige and brown colour palette, and a clever use of lighting, the pop-up bought an audience into a world that was entirely NikeSKIMs, leaving the bustle of Paris behind.
Within that space, they offered yoga and ballet classes to visitors, making for a really immersive feel, and targeting the sort of activities their audience was likely to enjoy, so that they could see the product in action. The walls were decorated with the iconic Nike swoosh, and the word ‘SKIMS’, so that any pictures shared on social media would advance their name further and get people talking about the experience.
Once again, we see two brands coming together to make use of an audience that exists with a vested interest in their product. To do that, they make real, creative use of space, using it to activate the brand, so that people see the product in the flesh, in action, as it would be in life.
That helps build a powerful sense of trust, and inspire customers to think: yes, I absolutely do need to invest in this athletic wear.
It’s The Experience Economy in Action
These experiences are designed with an inflection on creativity, and intentionality. The partnerships are selected as a part of that: a way for brands to come together over their shared cause, for their shared audience.
Partnerships are a way for big brands to go big or go home with their experiences, and show them off to wider audiences.
The partnership is a key part of it, but the real heart of these marketing endeavours is the experience that these partnerships afford.
As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore explained in their book ‘The Experience Economy’, the value of immersing a customer in an experience cannot be understated.
Consumers are increasingly relying on the tangibility of an experience, over the instant gratification of objects. Being treated in a personalised way at their local cafe, or making memories with a friend at a pop-up experience makes them far more likely to recall your brand, and come to it again and again.
That’s what these big brands are drawing on with these pop-up experiences.
Key Lessons for Experiential Marketing
An experience makes you visible – people crave novelty. When you target your experience well, you’re likely to get a lot of attendance, and then a lot of consequential buzz on social media.
We talk about it a lot; your event is not a one-off thing. It should fit into your digital calendar as well, helping people recognise you overall. These pop-ups are prime examples of how they fit together.
An experience is a creative way of connecting – none of these three pop-ups is in any way similar to the others.
This is a lesson in bringing your own creativity to the table when it comes to experiential: the real power of an original idea in creating buzz.
It makes you memorable – long after the experience has popped back down again, people will talk about it. The more creative your idea, the better.
You’re not just creating an experience or an event: you’re creating a relationship with your customers.
And in an experience economy, that goes a long, long way.
Planning your own brand experience or exhibition stand?
Whether it's on your own, or with another brand you love, get in touch with us today.
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