Written by
Abbie Mason
Cross-pollination: why aren’t you doing it?
For years, brands have been told to obsess over their audience. Build the community. Own the customer. Protect the data. Keep people inside the ecosystem.
Introduction
We need to talk about brand gatekeeping.
For years, brands have been told to obsess over their audience. Build the community. Own the customer. Protect the data. Keep people inside the ecosystem.
Fair enough. But your audience isn’t only your audience.
They’re buying coffee from one brand, clothes from another, booking restaurants, following chefs, going to fitness studios, discovering new products on Instagram and picking up recommendations from friends — often all in the same day.
So why are brands still marketing as though they exist in isolation?
Enter: cross-pollination.
Not collaboration for collaboration’s sake. Not two logos slapped onto something because someone fancied a launch party. We mean strategically partnering with brands that share an audience, occasion, location, value system or cultural space — even when they sell something completely different.
Because sometimes the quickest route to your next customer is through a brand they already know.
Think audience alignment, not category alignment
The best partnership isn’t necessarily between two businesses in the same category. In fact, being too similar can make the collaboration less useful.
A meta-analysis of 37 co-branding studies found that the relationship between the brands had a greater influence on co-branding success than the characteristics of the individual brands. Importantly, brand-image fit mattered more than product-category fit.
Translation?
A seaweed snack brand doesn’t necessarily need another food brand. It might need the right running club.
A drinks brand could make more sense in an independent café than next to another drinks brand.
A fashion label and restaurant might have far more audience chemistry than two clothing brands competing for the same spend.
That’s the opportunity: shared people, different products.
You’re not splitting the audience. You’re creating more ways in.
Good cross-pollination creates something neither brand could quite achieve alone.
A menu special puts a product into a new consumption occasion. A chef takeover creates a reason for people to visit. A joint giveaway encourages audiences to move between two social ecosystems. A pop-up turns awareness into a physical experience. A limited-edition product gives press, creators and customers something new to talk about.
And, importantly, both brands bring distribution.
Look at Greggs x Primark. Bakery meets fashion shouldn’t necessarily make sense on a spreadsheet. But culturally? It did.
According to Marketing Week, the campaign reached 87% of the UK population and more than 95% of Greggs’ core audience through editorial, while most of the collection sold out within two days.
Different products. Compatible audiences and brand personalities. One significantly bigger conversation.
Or take Oxford coffee company NewGround’s collaboration with Ace & Tate: a two-day activation bringing together coffee, eyewear, discounts and giveaways. They’re completely different product categories, but the brands had relevant common ground, including their B Corp credentials and Oxford presence. NewGround explains the collaboration here.
That’s cross-pollination working properly.
The maths is more interesting than “double the reach”
We often talk about collaborations as a way of “doubling your reach”.
Technically, that’s not quite right.
If Brand A has 100,000 followers and Brand B has 80,000, your potential audience isn’t automatically 180,000. Some people follow both. Not everyone sees every piece of content. And follower numbers aren’t the same thing as meaningful attention.
The number we’re actually interested in is incremental reach: how many relevant people can this partnership introduce to your brand who you weren’t already reaching effectively?
That’s why the questions before any collaboration should be:
How much do our audiences overlap?
What audience does our partner give us access to that we don’t already have?
What behaviour are we actually trying to create?
That could be new-to-brand reach, sampling, footfall, email acquisition, earned media, social engagement, trial or direct sales.
Decide that before you decide what goes on the tote bag.
Give people something to do
The strongest partnerships aren’t announcements. They’re activations.
In 2025, Onitsuka Tiger created its Finish Line Café in Covent Garden, where visitors who showed they’d completed 10,000 steps could receive a drink from Origin Coffee and a chocolate medal. Footwear, movement and coffee became one physical experience rather than three disconnected brand mentions. See the activation here.
British Vogue and Nike have similarly brought food, fashion and wellness together through a London Fashion Week concept café. Condé Nast covered the partnership here.
And this is where cross-pollination gets particularly interesting for growing brands.
You don’t need a huge collaborative SKU, six months of development and a terrifying production budget.
Put your drink on someone else’s menu. Get a chef to create a special using your product. Take over a café for a morning. Swap products for an online giveaway. Build a bundle. Create an exclusive flavour. Host a supper club. Put beauty into fitness. Bring food into fashion. Bring fashion into hospitality.
Create a reason for Audience A to meet Brand B — and vice versa.
But “we have the same demographic” isn’t a strategy
This is where brands can get it wrong.
Two businesses targeting 25–34-year-old Londoners with disposable income does not automatically make them good partners.
Look deeper.
You want alignment across values, visual world, price point, behaviours, cultural interests, customer occasions and community — while ideally offering complementary rather than competing products.
A more recent meta-analysis published in the Journal of Business Research found an overall positive effect of brand alliances on focal brands, while also showing that the context surrounding those alliances matters.
And there is a useful warning here. Research published in Marketing Letters found that simply presenting brands together in co-branded advertising didn’t automatically improve memorability and could reduce individual brand recall. Read the research here.
In other words:
Two logos aren’t a strategy.
There needs to be an idea.
Measure it like a channel, not a nice-to-have
This is where we get slightly less sexy and considerably more useful.
If cross-pollination is going to become part of your growth strategy, rather than a nice Instagram post every six months, treat partnerships as a measurable marketing channel.
Set the objective and baseline first. Then look at metrics such as incremental reach, audience overlap, referral traffic, unique-code or UTM conversions, samples distributed, footfall, CRM sign-ups, earned media reach, engagement, share of voice, cost per acquisition and brand-search lift.
Give partners trackable links. Use unique codes. Tag acquisition sources in your CRM. Look at how many people engaging with the activation were genuinely new to your brand.
Then ask the question that actually matters:
Did this partnership introduce us to relevant people we weren’t reaching efficiently before?
If the answer is yes, you’ve built more than a collaboration.
You’ve built another distribution channel.
Conclusion
Stop protecting your patch. Start expanding it.
Audiences don’t live in category silos. Brands shouldn’t either. The person buying your seaweed snacks also buys trainers. The person ordering your matcha books restaurants. Your fashion customer probably has a favourite coffee shop, gym, chef, skincare brand, hotel and newsletter. Those connections already exist in your customer’s life. Your marketing should start reflecting them. Find brands with the right audience adjacency, enough shared DNA and something genuinely complementary to contribute. Build an idea that gives people a reason to care. Give both brands a meaningful role. And measure what each audience brings to the other. Because your next growth audience might not need to be built from scratch. Someone else may already have their attention. So, why aren’t you cross-pollinating?