The brand trip is dead. Long live the brand trip.
From the 2023 Shein tour that some commenters compared to an influencer trip to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; to Brandon Edelman’s ill-received trip to Coachella courtesy of a boycotted Starbucks; to, most recently, the debut brand trip for OpenAI to the idyllic Wildflower Farms in New York’s Hudson Valley, netizens have not shied from voicing their displeasure at seeing brands attempt to create good will through lavish influencer trips.
And yet none of those controversies have killed off the brand trip as a marketing ploy entirely. But while some brands, like Alo Yoga’s June yacht voyage to the French Riviera with the likes of Alix Earle and Jake Shane, are sticking to a traditionally extravagant model, others are attempting to evolve the brand trip with the times.
“It takes a while for brands and marketers to break out of something that has worked. And I think those kinds of influencer-sponsored moments have been very effective for a long time,” said Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer of North America at creative branding agency VML. But consumers today expect more compelling, entertaining content on their social feeds, rather than just pristine aesthetics.
“They have to rebrand the brand trip. You can still do brand trips, but you need to think about how the content you’re asking people to make is curated,” said Bamford. “My advice for any brand at the moment would be to steer very clear of doing something that feels fairly superficial, like these trips have been, and to think about more creative ways to show your brand in action. Show some failure. People don’t mind it — actually, they want to see it.”
One creative workaround to avoid the negative feedback that can flood the comments on typical brand trip content is to invite the commenters on the trip themselves.
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