California Management Review

Abstract

Brand collaborations are widely used to generate attention, yet many fail to create lasting value. This is because brands focus too much on who to partner with rather than on how to design the collaboration. Using the Omega/Swatch collaboration and drawing on interviews and search data, this article develops a playbook for designing effective collaborations. Successful collaborations require each brand to contribute something unique, brand identities to remain distinct, and added value for both consumer bases. They also need to balance similarity and differentiation to avoid substitution and shift focus from short-term hype to sustained cross-brand spillovers.

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