From Stranger Things x KFC to McDonald's x Friends: 5 ways brands can build meaningful partnerships

Brand partnerships are booming. From fast food stepping into entertainment worlds with Stranger Things and KFC’s limited edition burger to footwear brands joining forces with toy giants to create brick-shaped clogs that look more like a ‘triumph of novelty over success’. Marketers are increasingly looking beyond their category for cultural relevance.

And it’s understandable why. Audiences are fragmented, and trends move faster than most brand planning cycles can keep up with. Collaboration, on the surface, offers a shortcut and a way to tap into new audiences and show up in culture without having to build everything from scratch.

But this pressure is exactly what’s driving a lot of partnerships into the same trap. Too many still sit firmly in the “logo-adding era” or surface-level alignments built for some launch-day noise rather than for driving long-term brand value.

The next wave of successful collaborations will be defined not by novelty, but by meaning and longevity. Here’s how brands can start moving in that direction:

1. Start with shared beliefs, not shared reach

Many partnerships begin with a simple trade: you have the audience we want. Interestingly though, McKinsey research shows that the total number of hours each day that people spend interacting with content has only increased by 1-2% a year over the past decade. At the same time, technological innovation and the rise of user-generated content ‘have created a dizzying array of choices’. Meaning the fight to maintain audience attention is more intense than ever.

But the strongest partnerships start with something deeper, where there’s shared values and subcultures.

When brands take the time to properly understand what they stand for and how they show up creatively and culturally, they uncover collaborations that feel natural rather than engineered. And over time, those partnerships stop feeling like campaigns and start to stick – becoming something people naturally associate with the brand, without needing to be reminded.

2. Aim for inevitability, not surprise

KFC x Stranger Things 5 - YouTube

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Marketers have long been obsessed with the unexpected pairing. Surprise can drive headlines and attention, but it’s a short-term tactic.

The partnerships that actually resonate with audiences tend to feel inevitable, as though the brands were always meant to meet. They reflect behaviours and rituals that already exist, rather than trying to invent new ones overnight.

Take KFC’s work with Stranger Things. Its sweet and spicy take on the Zinger Burger works not because it’s unexpected, but because it connects things that already sit together in real life: comfort food, shared viewing, nostalgia and escapism. The collaboration simply makes that relationship visible.

3. Design for cultural longevity, not just the campaign lifespan

Too often, partnerships are treated as fleeting moments, but the more strategic approach is to treat them as the entry point – a way to shift how a brand is perceived, who it’s relevant to, or how it participates in culture.

Our recent work with Digital Cinema Media (DCM) for the McDonald’s x Friends collaboration is a good example. On the surface, it was a nostalgic, time-bound activation. But the more strategic ambition was to reintroduce the show’s cultural relevance to a younger audience now discovering it through streaming, memes and social conversation.

By treating the partnership as a gateway into contemporary fandom, rather than just a nostalgic moment, it helped build new associations that could outlive the campaign. It made sure the partnership did not just borrow for nostalgia, but also reshaped how it’s understood.

4. Embed in fan culture, don’t just borrow from it

Audiences today, especially younger ones, are highly fluent in brand behaviour. They can immediately spot when something feels off. One of the most common mistakes brands make is treating culture like an aesthetic to borrow from, rather than something to participate in meaningfully.

The partnership between Arsenal F.C. and Aries works because it reflects how football, fashion and identity already intersect for a younger generation of fans. It feels like a cultural signal that naturally fits into their lives, as opposed to a stunt.Too many collaborations feel hollow because they reference culture without really understanding it. And that distinction matters. Modern audiences don’t reward brands for simply showing up, they reward them for showing up authentically and therefore get remembered.

5. Make partnerships feel contextual

Even the most strategically aligned collaboration can fall flat if it’s experienced in the wrong environment. Successful brands understand that where and how audiences encounter a partnership shapes how it’s perceived just as much as the idea itself.

Cinema is a good example because it provides the perfect opportunity to show up in moments of high attention and emotion in an environment where audiences are more receptive and less distracted. For us, this has shown up in partnerships we’ve activated with Specsavers, Google Pixel and organisations like the Royal Air Force.

In those environments, the work doesn’t feel like an interruption but more additive to the experience.

Embrace the next era of partnerships

The logo-add era was dominated by speed and virality. The next era will belong to brands willing to go deeper and build partnerships that feel inevitable, culturally embedded and contextually meaningful.

Because the best partnerships aren’t the ones that trend on launch day. They’re the ones that still matter long after the headlines fade.