Mad Libs fo brands | Jaya Saxena
Brand collaborations barely make sense anymore. That’s kind of what they’re going for.
On Bastille Day in 1916, Hugo Ball published the Dada manifesto, a declaration explaining “a new tendency in art” that was meant to seek meaning in newness, even if what was created didn’t make sense. We were on the brink of World War I, and much of the public seemed too politically complacent. It didn’t make any sense. Was everyone just content with how things were? To Ball and other Dada artists, the only logical reaction was to be illogical and absurdist. “I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it,” wrote Ball. Perhaps, through not making sense, actual truth could be found.
Once again, we’re living in a bit of a post-sense world. Nearly every day, something happens that is not only a disaster for a good chunk of humanity, but profoundly stupid. What else do you call potentially calculating tariffs with ChatGPT, or including a journalist on your war crimes group chat when you’re the U.S. Secretary of Defense? This has all led to an even more postmodern sequel to Dadaism, except this time around, it’s the brands that are leading the charge instead of artists. Or, at least, this is my best theory as to why the brand collaborations I’m seeing in the foodscape have gotten so bizarre.
When it comes to our limited attention spans, one name, one brand, one product just does not do it anymore. In 2023, we hit “peak restaurant collab,” when every week one chef was popping up in another’s kitchen, working on a menu fusing their tastes. It may have been fun for all involved, but it was also a necessary and overall positive business strategy. Ten years ago, “if you got a New York Times review, you would be flooded,” said Lilli Sherman of marketing events company OMA at the time. “You were set at least for a few months. And that really isn’t the case anymore.” Collaborations attracted potential new customers, and kept restaurants in conversation long after opening night. Plus, it made sense for two restaurants to join forces — they both make food, and it’s easy to serve dishes that showcase a combination of ingredients and techniques that can offer something greater than the sum of their parts.
With the rise of direct-to-consumer brands, this tactic became popular with food and cookware brands as well, from Fishwife x Fly By Jing’s Sichuan-chile-crisp smoked salmon to Graza and Areaware’s clever Drizz & Dip set.
But somewhere, things took a wrong turn, and recently, food brands are upping the ante by pairing with brands totally outside the realm of dining and eating. We have entered a peculiar moment in late capitalism where a body wash can become a smoothie, a beer can become a skin cream, and a very boring piece of B2B software can become a matcha drink, all in the name of promoting two products at once.
Take this sampling of recent examples, just from launches over the past month. 5-Hour Energy has teamed up with Taco John’s for an energizing hot sauce — at least those are two edible products, though I don’t need a hot sauce that keeps me up until 2 a.m. Dialog Cafe in LA decided to launch a Strawberry Kiss smoothie based on a ColourPop lip balm. Red Clay Hot Sauce teamed up with shampoo brand Tresemmé to launch Hot Gloss, a spicy peach hot honey, which is supposedly somewhat related to its hair oil. There’s a Sprinkles x Moon collaboration yielding cupcake-flavored toothpaste and a jazzed-up toothbrush, and who could resist Chamberlain Coffee’s Oat Milk & Berry Brulee latte inspired by a Dove body wash of the same scent? And who on Earth asked for a matcha latte made in collaboration with some inventory software company? Food and fashion are an ever-popular combination, but that doesn’t really explain the motivation behind the “Cherry on Top” earring collection from Studs and Van Leeuwen ice cream, an “unexpected partnership between two buzzy, boundary-pushing brands [that] combines the art of Earscaping and self-expression with the joy of indulgence,” according to the press release.
The focus on marketing has become so consuming that many companies have lost the plot on consumer experience and desire. Perhaps food brands see this as an opportunity to remind you who they are when you’re least likely to be thinking of them, like when you’re in the shower. But mostly, they make me consider the very nature of reality. What is the purpose of a product? Is hot sauce a beverage? Is a smoothie lipstick? That’s good for the lifelong project of connecting with my inner consciousness, but I’m not sure it’s good for business. Like Dada collages, they seem pasted together at random. I had to double check half of these to make sure the PR emails weren’t sent on April Fools’ Day, and I almost included some that were actual pranks because they were so indistinguishable from the real ones.
Everything has to be as weird as possible to even make a dent in the social media landscape; Who cares about a new candy bar — even if it’s made with protein — unless it has a name like Hormbles Chormbles? But attention is not success. Thinking of body wash while sipping a latte doesn’t make me like the coffee or the body wash more, it just makes me think about drinking soap, and not inclined to have positive feelings toward either product. Absurdity is fun, but I don’t want to drizzle it on my pizza. There’s a reason Dada was an artistic reaction to the absurdity of global politics, not a capitalist one.
