By Kat Roush
When did the ability to sell more things become more important than whether we actually need them? Everything seems to be becoming something else. Brands used to make products that made them unique and instantly recognizable. That product, allocated to a specific category, is what put that brand on the map. Though these categorizations still exist, the lines have been blurred, considerably. But who cares about that categorization anymore when your favorite childhood crayon brand can make perfume. The proliferation of unusual brand extensions is not simply a case of companies running out of ideas. It reflects an economy in which the most valuable thing a company can possess is not the ability to make a particular product, but the ability to sell something new to an existing consumer.
The traditional consumer economy was organized around categories where companies competed within their respective markets to sell a particular product. The boundaries that once separated brands and their products are becoming hard to see. Brands now seek to fit into the ever-so-popular lifestyle and aesthetic industry that can stamp a recognizable name onto almost anything. This shift doesn’t start or end with the example of food products collaborating with beauty products with the lipstick created between Nando’s and Maybelline being a great example. Netflix demonstrates this shift as well, developing a catalogue of 120 preexisting, popular online games within its film and television service.
Brands treat their customer relationships, intellectual property, and cultural recognition as assets they can use across multiple markets. French theorist Guy Debord once wrote in The Society of The Spectacle (1967) that “the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions.” More than a half century later, the observation feels quite applicable to today’s consumer economy, where a product’s appeal is less concerned with necessity than it is the novelty of collaboration, or the recognition of a familiar name.
Companies are becoming quite creative at finding new products to sell to the same customers. A collaboration between brands allows a company to enter an unfamiliar category without building all the manufacturing expertise or infrastructure itself. And, as acquiring a new audience of consumers can be expensive, these collaborations can cost-effectively woo preexisting consumers with a new product. A limited-edition collaboration of brands may earn attention and revenue far beyond the number of generic units sold. This reflects the economy being increasingly built around expansion rather than specialization, and there is substantial money behind this practice.
A 2026 study by Oxford Economics commissioned by the International Promotional Products Association established that $174 billion was spent on branded merchandise in the United States in 2025. And of that, $124 billion was attributed to licensed merchandise, and the remaining $50 billion spent on promotional products. These figures encompass a broader market than just unusual brand collaboration, showing the scale of an economy where product value can come just from the name attached. But seeing the logic does not mean accepting the outcome. The fact that a company can use its reputation to produce something with no meaningful purpose proves that a commercially rational decision is not necessarily a socially valuable one.
Limited-edition collaborations make this contradiction quite visible. Their appeal often lies in the fact that they are unexpected, temporary, and often inane. 60% of consumers in the United States are driven to purchase limited-edition products by FOMO (fear-of-missing-out). Though the figure should be treated cautiously without clearer information about the survey sample and methodology, the non-essentiality is easy to recognize. Novelty can encourage people to buy something they might otherwise never have considered.
In 2024, Coca-Cola collaborated with Oreo, selling limited edition products, and even included a QR code printed directly onto the limited-edition OREO flavored Coca-Cola cans that opened Spotify accounts and linked them with friends’ accounts. The cross-collaboration campaign was not confined to just one of the categories that these brands traditionally occupied. A soft drink and a cookie creating products together and partnering with the music industry resulted in another way to sell consumers something they think they need. A maneuver like this can result in 28% of consumers buying only the limited-edition Oreos and passing on the regular flavors. Products like this could be commercially useful to the brand even if their long-term sales are modest, bringing temporary attention and sales. At a point where consumers spend money based on the excitement of a purchase before it becomes unavailable, this tri-collaboration demonstrates how effectively companies manufacture new reasons to buy.
The wider licensing industry suggests that this is more than a temporary gimmick. Licensing International reported that global retail sales of licensed merchandise and services reached $389.8 billion in 2025, an increase of 5.45% on the previous year. The coffee chain Dunkin’ partnered with deodorant brand Native to launch a limited-edition line of doughnut-scented personal-care products, illustrating the commercial appeal of extending an established brand into an entirely different market. Although the financial returns from the collaboration have not been publicly disclosed, the partnership allowed Native to bring Dunkin’s recognizable identity into consumers’ everyday grooming routines, turning the appeal of a familiar food brand into a selling point for products that have little to do with its original business. But there is a distinction between developing a product around satisfying a consumer’s previously unmet needs, versus finding a new way to monetize a brand name.
Though, a point must be made here: publicity is not the same as profit and viral attention does not establish a financially successful launch. Sometimes it seems the point of an absurd product or collaboration is not to sell it, but to prove that a company could find a way to expand its brand. Take the hypothetical Greggs lager concept. Greggs could put its name on a beer, generate headlines, and perhaps persuade curious customers to try it. But why should a bakery’s reputation for sausage rolls translate into a reason to buy lager? Greggs would have to work hard to convince consumers that this sort of extension makes sense.
This is when an expansion attempt becomes confusing. A company risks weakening the identity that it makes valuable in the first place when it presents a product that obscures what it stands for. Rather than strengthening the brand, the extension can make it feel less distinctive, blurring the associations that once made it recognizable.
If companies continue to find new revenue streams, enter new categories, and extract more value from existing customers, when does the expansion become excessive or repetitive? This just might be the tension at the heart of the modern brand economy. Sometimes these collaborations produce a genuinely useful product or a partnership that gives several companies access to new markets. Sometimes they produce a limited-edition novelty whose greatest achievement is making people ask why it exists in the first place. The absurd nature of crayon perfume is beside the point; what matters is the economic logic, or lack thereof.
The modern brand is no longer defined by what it makes, or the market category it falls under, but what it can attach its name to for commercial opportunity maximization. This represents an increasingly desperate search for growth in a market where every product already exists, and unnecessary goods are in abundance. Perhaps companies have not run out of ideas – they have become too good at finding reasons to make more.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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