The holy grail for any clothing brand is if they can sell virtual merchandise at scale without ever having to manufacture anything, which is exactly what Nike have managed to achieve with their newly announced collaboration with Fortnite.

Epic has partnered with Nike’s Jordan brand to deliver branded content to the game. As part of the collaboration a new specially themed game mode has been added as well as some Jordan cosmetic gear.

While this is the first specific clothing brand partnership that Fortnite has had, it isn’t the first time the game has featured licensed products and skins in game. Just last week Epic released a John Wick skin and game mode. Two weeks ago Marvel and Epic teamed up for the Avengers: Endgame mode. And last year, the developer partnered with the NFL to release skins for each of the National Football League’s 32 teams. via

Of course not every brand can simply call up the owners of Fortnite, Epic games, and announce that they can to sell their virtual stuff as a part of the game. You need to behold a brand that is desirable enough to entice the millions of gamers on the platform to want to buy the in-game bundle. This is surely the truest test of any brand’s desirability.

But for brands like Nike that are dedicated to brand building and design, the opportunities with virtual collaborations are endless.

Banksy made a brief appearance in the form of a pop up art stall in Venice Italy – before being told to shove off by police, because the stall didn’t have a trading licence.

Banksy was crashing the Venice Art Biennale – wondering out loud on Instagram why he has never been invited.

It’s been a while since Banksy last really caught our attention – we wonder now if the message isn’t completely overshadowed by the brand? The artist themselves have now become the message they are trying to make us all think about.

Over the years we have prided ourselves on having produced numerous great examples of ‘futures world building’ for innovative clients like BAT, Dimension Data, UCT’s Graduate School of Business, Santam and Woolworths; so we totally get and buy into the immense power that fictional narratives can play for companies wanting to explore possible imaginative futures.

Although now, with a far more holistic understanding of the science behind futures studies, we can retroactively see the value of creating a mental space to prototype new ideas and concepts via the suspension of reality in the present through what we now understand to be design fiction.

With kind permission from Stuart Candy and Liam Young – we are republishing a conversation that had recently around the power of design fiction / world building as a strategic business tool.

Stuart Candy: How would you describe your practice in relation to the intersection of futures and design?
Liam Young: I’m trained as an architect, so I am interested in the architectural, urban and global implications of emerging technologies. I don’t design buildings but rather I design, imagine, speculate, and construct worlds. The world is the medium in which I prototype futures. It’s a very spatial way of thinking about future narratives. I predominantly explore these worlds through the medium of film. For me films are a way of disseminating these worlds to audiences. So that’s where my own practice sits in the context of design/futures practices. It differentiates itself by thinking about worlds as the medium of operating, as opposed to products, characters, buildings, and so on.

Great brands – like Nike – sign you up to take part in a revolution; and then sell you the uniform.

For some time now, the brand have taken the position of injecting themselves deep into the heart of the much heated racial and gender equality debate that is raging in America.

They have deliberately opened themselves up to polarisation. They have consciously decided not to stand on the sidelines – like most companies do, because they are just too afraid to get involved – and have chosen rather to encourage their recruits to dream of a different tomorrow, that looks quite different from the ‘reality’ of today.

That a bold move – to ask people to dream with you about another kind of future. Understandably, not everyone is going to like this move, but that’s exactly what Nike want. They want you to make the choice as to whether you are with them or against them.

Old men and misogynists will feel hugely threatened by this line of thinking, but the world is a very diverse place, and even though these people make a lot of noise, the future doesn’t lie with them. So the more they belly-ache about ‘this nonsense’ – the better.

Checkers recently announced that they are bringing back a new collectable series called Little Checkers where with every purchase amounting to R200, you get a Block (which looks a lot like Lego, but it’s not Lego) which you can then use to build your very own small supermarket.

What Checkers have also done this time – as apposed to when they ran the Little Garden promotion – is to team up with brands like WeetBix, Liqui Fruit, Pringles and loads of others to enhance the experience, and presumably, the cost of the exercise too, which I assure you – is not cheap.

Little Checkers started on Monday [6 May 2019] – so I’m sure that parents are already coming up with creative reasons as to why they don’t need to go to Checkers for the third time this week – and will last for as long as the stocks last.

In recent years these collectable campaigns done by the big South African retailers have become all the rage as a tactical marketing tool. On the surface of it they clearly have a short-term sales impact (some estimate that turnover during these campaigns increases by up to 10%). This increase is achieved by an improvement in visitor frequency, but also through an increase in the basket size of each shopper. I would assume that on average people who normally shop at Checkers would spend well less than R200 a time at Checkers, what this campaign does is increase that, at least for the duration of the program.

There is however a darker competitive advantage that, running a Little Checkers promotion at strategically significant times of the year, gives Checkers that I had never considered before.

Retailers tend to measure themselves as to the amount of market share that they command in the local marketplace. So, as an example, a group like Checkers would measure their market share against the likes of Pick n Pay, Woolies and Spar. If at the start of a season – when new stock is in store in all four of those retailers (like a new shipment of winter jackets or vast amounts of vegetable soup) – and one of them can purposefully draw shoppers away from spending their money at their competitors in favour of scoring a cheap collectable character in exchange for a R200 shop, and therefore affecting their competitor’s sales projections for that period; that would have a material impact on the trading performance of their competitors. A financial impact that would be difficult for a competitor to come back from for the rest of the year.

That’s a dark move, and in a marketplace where margins are razor thin – a potentially disastrous one.

What this does also highlight, is that retailers in South Africa are struggling to secure a sustainable competitive advantage. They have all fallen into the trap of having to rely on short-term price and promotional tactics to maintain profitability, rather than innovating ways to build long-term brand value in the minds of shoppers.

So brace yourselves for the new promotion from Checkers – it may look like they’re giving away toys for kids – but this is certainly not fun and games, it’s serious modern day cut-throat retailing at play here.

The 2019 South African National Elections are now over and the votes have been tallied, but I thought it would be useful to reflect on what we said advertising-wise [on CapeTalk567] leading up to these elections and see how that translated at the poles.

I’ll remind you that we said that the ANC haven’t changed their campaign advertising style since 1994 and that the 2019 version didn’t look any different. They arrogantly just relied on the ‘tried and tested’ formula, didn’t bother to innovate, didn’t try to bring across anything other than you were simply voting for President Cyril Ramaphosa. Their approach was very much like the party itself – lacking in creative ideas and youthful energy.

The DA basically force-fed their campaign through to the electorate and focused not on what policies their were hoping to implement, but rather elected to attack the ANC and EFF.

After years of flagging sales and decreasing levels of interest in their annual televised fashion show, the powers that Victoria’s Secret are admitting that they have failed to innovate over the past couple of years and its come back to hit them hard.

The brand has taken a lot of flack for continuing to hire super-skinny models – and in a world where all around them their competitors are moving towards far more diversity when it comes to shapes, shades and sizes – Victoria’s Secret is starting to look like it’s stuck in the victorian-era.