Invite People To Be A Part Of Your Brand By Designing The Right Experiences

I’ve talked about building a brand that people join not buy before. Super brands have a significant opportunity, and responsibility, to explore new ways to invite their consumers to join their brands through a deeper and more meaningful story.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chelsea Matthews, Founder of Matte Black, to share their recent brand collaboration with Juice Served Here and MAP to design a creative campaign that creates context and a narrative around a relatively boring topic–nation-wide shipping.

In line with the launch of Juice Served Here’s national shipping, Matte Black partnered with MAP, a trusted community of discerning travel influencers, to create a four-part series of city guides in key markets.

“The premise of the project is simple, we wanted to build relevancy in new markets, and as such, we created free downloadable city guides in core west coast cities. This created valuable content for the existing Juice Served Here audience, created visibility in new markets through the city guide curators’ audience––all 25k followers on Instagram–and the MAP community had an opportunity to showcase their lens of the cities to our audience. The city guides were curated by four selected MAP Trailblazers–those who are both active within the MAP community and who generally just share great content–and they hit the streets to garner images of their favorite haunts. The images were then gathered and designed by Matte Black’s team to create downloadable city guides in Portland, San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland” says Matthews.

Uncommon experiences bring attention to brands

The first reaction to the project was that from the start the MAP community was very engaged. The effort garnered a number of requests to create additional city guides in other markets and Juice Served Here saw some of our highest ever click-throughs. In a short time, hundreds, if not thousands, of new eyeballs were viewing the brand.

The collaboration between the brands aspires to create value in the story. By offering something for free that shows personality and perspective we were able to create context and narrative in conversation around national shipping.

Create opportunities for brands to partner with you around your products and causes

What inspired the collaboration was a previous relationship and a common love for connection. Matte Black knew the team behind MAP and the community they’ve built. They knew that aligning with them for this launch would not only resonate with the existing Juice Served Here community, but also introduce it to a very valuable set of doers and adventurers around the U.S. who they wanted to connect with.

Collaboration between brands can be a meaningful experience for customers

The project promotes a lifestyle. The connection between urban exploration and juice brings likeminded communities together while also providing a meaningful tool they can use. Small efforts can make a big difference. Matte Black saw an opportunity to work hand-in-hand with niche communities and designed an experience that helped bring awareness to two brands, making them more relevant to a wider audience and stronger market.

Matthews says, “For us, it was really about cross pollination of audience, with context. Leveraging incredible talent (ie. the Trailblazers) to create beautiful content–valuable to both new eyeballs and existing–while spreading a very important message around a new brand launch.”

Curiosity and a collaborative mindset provides insight that fuels each stage of a business

Juice Served Here is about never following the conventional path (#neverconventional), so rather than simply sending out product in these new markets they created a deeper connection that people across the west coast can share. 

Explore the brand collaborated guides below. 

• Portland: https://www.juiceservedhere.com/unconventional/city-guides-portland
• Oakland: https://www.juiceservedhere.com/unconventional/city-guides-oakland
• SF: https://www.juiceservedhere.com/unconventional/city-guides-san-francisco
• San Diego: https://www.juiceservedhere.com/unconventional/introducing-city-guides-by-jsh-x-map

Photo: Shawn Parr