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Brands have always borrowed from culture. Credibility, vibe, meaning — if you can get it wholesale. As we wrote a few editions ago, the trouble starts when that borrowing becomes extractive: brands dropping into cultural spaces not to contribute, but simply to be seen.
Now the same instinct is playing out laterally. Brands are increasingly borrowing from each other — licensing, remixing, co-creating — not to make something new, but to prove they’re still moving. Still interesting. Still here.
The result is a culture crowded with co-signs. Everyone’s launching something and aligning with someone. But if everyone’s borrowing equity, what’s left to own?
Collaborations can be clever. Some even land brilliantly. But most don’t go beyond the drop — and too many confuse proximity with purpose. Borrowed visibility gets mistaken for brand growth, without moving the needle.
The question isn’t whether brands should collaborate. It’s why boring co-branding has become the default, and what that reveals about the widening gap between momentary visibility and long-term meaning.
For mid-sized brands, the impulse to borrow isn’t about vanity, but survival. When you’ve got one shot to make noise, you lean on someone louder. But as culture becomes more fragmented, more self-protective and less tolerant of brand tourism, the cost of showing up without a point of view is only getting steeper.
So what does it look like when borrowing works, and brands walk away with more than just attention?
Borrowing that builds equity
Most collaborations start with a familiar logic: what can we create together that we couldn’t do alone? But that logic rarely survives the execution. More often, the partnership becomes a placeholder.
The idea that something must be happening — because two logos have agreed to stand near each other — gets mistaken for the thing itself. What’s missing isn’t effort, but clarity.
There’s a difference between borrowing to participate and borrowing to transform. The first is tactical: a co-branded tote bag, a themed menu item, a cross-post that flares and disappears. The second takes more precision. It means knowing what you're borrowing, and what you're willing to relinquish in return.
Brands love to talk about values, but few have a voice that feels lived-in. Most campaigns hire one temporarily — a creator, a partner, a borrowed accent that never quite lands. What’s rarer is a brand stepping back and letting someone else speak entirely. That takes confidence — not just in the creator, but in the fact that the brand can survive the silence.
That’s what made Sharpie’s decision so striking. A back-to-school campaign could have drifted into stationery tropes: soft pastels, neat handwriting, a brand trying to reappear on shopping lists. But for Sharpie, ‘showing up to champion self-expression was key to unlocking this audience’ and finding the right personality to deliver the message was essential.
Florence Given — illustrator, author and a creator known for vibrant self expression — wasn’t asked to contribute. She was asked to lead. Her visuals, her handwriting and her politics were threaded into every execution. Digital Natives didn’t polish the work. They ran it as-is, full funnel. The campaign reached 16.1 million, exceeded performance targets by 65%, and brought the brand into a tone of voice it could never have written for itself. Not a collaboration. A quiet handover.
Then there’s the question of platform — not just where the work lives, but what logic it runs on. Some platforms can be rented. Others demand submission. Twitch is one of the latter. It doesn’t host content, it absorbs it — rewiring whatever touches it. Most brands try to force a message through anyway. But Netflix understood that if you’re entering someone else’s logic, you have to let go of your own.
Blood Red Sky, a low-budget German horror film with no IP and no lead talent, should have sunk. Instead, with Tommy, Netflix rebuilt the film’s airplane set, filled it with influencers, wired it with hidden CCTV, and let the Twitch audience take control. Viewers triggered oxygen masks, power cuts, jump scares.
One hundred thousand watched live. Over three million followed. The film hit number one in 57 countries. It wasn’t just distributed through Twitch — it was shaped by it. Netflix didn’t borrow audience. It borrowed tempo. And the audience responded in kind.
And on attention — by the time most brands respond to what’s trending, the moment has passed. That’s not just a speed issue. It’s a control issue. To move fast, you have to loosen your grip — on messaging, on planning, on credit. Few marketers are built for that kind of surrender. But sometimes, that’s where the sharpest brand-building happens.
Not every borrowing begins with permission. Some begin as accidents. Chipotle’s “Keithadilla” wasn’t born in a brainstorm. It came from TikTok, where creators Keith Lee and Alexis Frost hacked a steak quesadilla and vinaigrette combo into an unlikely cult hit.
Most brands would have posted a thank-you or sent a kit. Chipotle, with Day One, rolled out the item formally — fast. They trained 100,000+ staff across 3,200 locations, updated their app, and renamed storefronts after the creators. It led to the brand’s biggest digital sales day, and a 37% lift in loyalty sign-ups. But the real move was subtler: they borrowed not content, but community direction — and moved quickly enough to make it look intentional.
Other times, what’s borrowed isn’t format or idea, but mood. Tone can’t be retrofitted. And yet most brand activations try — dressing up a venue in the right palette and hoping the vibe follows. But real connection requires more than aesthetics. It asks brands to step back and create space, not presence. It’s not just about being part of a scene. It’s knowing when to leave the room.
At the end of the year, when dating fatigue peaks and loneliness trends upward, Bumble could’ve defaulted to a cosy ad about meeting someone over mulled wine. Instead, with Onepointfive, they threw a house party. A real one. Seven themed rooms in Stormzy’s new Soho venue. Tarot, karaoke, nostalgic snacks, a Mabel performance. Five thousand people applied. Four hundred came.
The branding was there, but faint. The structure existed, but barely. What they borrowed was a cultural script — the emotional arc of a party that might go somewhere, if you let it. No one was told what to feel. But the space left just enough room to feel something anyway.
Some collaborations land because of what the brands have in common. But the best ones hold tension — they make you look twice. When the pairing makes no sense on paper, every decision becomes a test of intent. Do both sides really mean it? Are they in, all the way? That’s what gives these campaigns their charge.
Pat McGrath Labs and Candy Crush is a pairing that could’ve collapsed under its own aesthetic confusion. But Manifest didn’t try to harmonise the two. They staged the dissonance. Lipsticks became power-ups. Influencer kits were seeded with $10K ruby rings that promptly “went missing.”
TikToks followed, full of faux FaceTime calls and mild hysteria. Candy Crush was reskinned in McGrath’s high-gloss palette. No one knew why it worked. They just knew it didn’t feel like content.
“Cross-category partnerships like this don’t just spark buzz — they build real brand value,” Manifest’s Hanna Magstadt told DCA. “By blending gaming and beauty, the collab brought Candy Crush into Pat’s glam-driven world in a bold, elevated way… It’s the kind of crossover that makes people stop scrolling and start talking.”
Over 3.2 million organic views later, it was clear both brands had borrowed something they couldn’t have accessed alone: surprise, scale, irreverence, edge.
What links these examples isn’t budget or category or platform. It’s posture. Each one knew what it was borrowing — a voice, a mechanic, a decision, a vibe, a type of audacity — and let that shape the creative. The brands didn’t attempt to polish the partnerships into sameness. They sharpened themselves against them.
The trouble with most brand borrowing is that it plays like a soft launch. The tone is safe, the assets are over-explained, the work tries to prove it belongs. But culture rarely rewards caution. It rewards clarity — of voice, of purpose, of point.
That’s where indie agencies often shine. Not because they have more ideas, but because they know what to do with a sharp one. They’re closer to the tension. Closer to the risk. They can move quickly, commit fully, and recognise when a strange idea is the right one.
Co-creation isn’t a tactic. It’s a type of trust. And the best collaborations aren’t the ones that go viral. They’re the ones that give something back — to the brand, to the partner, to the people watching. They don’t chase the feed; they slow it down, let it stretch. Give it texture.
When done well, borrowed relevance doesn’t just buy you time in culture: it makes people look again.
Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor.
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