Weird Brand Collabs That Prove the Marketing Brainstorm Has Officially Entered Its Villain Era: 20 Images

Unexpected brand collaborations have quietly become one of the richest veins of content the internet produces, because they sit at the exact intersection of “this cannot be real” and “I need to own this immediately.” The novelty product market has always existed, but something shifted somewhere, and now it is not enough to simply make a good product. The product must also be a moment. It must generate discourse. It must make a person stop their scroll, tilt their head, and type “wait” into a reply box.

Crocs, in particular, has constructed an entire identity around this principle and is clearly unwilling to slow down for any reason whatsoever. The limited edition collaborations they have produced represent a brand that looked at the concept of dignity and decided it was a soft cap, not a hard ceiling. A stiletto heel Croc exists. Balenciaga made it. It costs more than most people’s monthly grocery budget, and it is also somehow correct. The Pop-Tarts Jibbitz are their own spiritual experience, and the Hidden Valley Ranch food charms are the work of a partnership that looked at two completely unrelated brand identities and found their shared frequency, which turns out to be “chaotic snack energy.”

Funny product launches earn their virality through a specific mechanism: they make the viewer feel like they have caught something happening in real time that cannot be explained by conventional logic. The Vlasic pickle candle is a textbook example. A pickle jar. That smells like a pickle. Sold as a candle. The product does exactly what it says. It solves no problem. It creates at least one new problem, which is that your home now smells specifically like a deli aisle. And yet people bought it, and they were right to do so, because the audacity of its existence demanded recognition.

Mac and cheese ice cream. That is a sentence. Van Leeuwen made it a reality, which means someone in a test kitchen tasted it and said yes, this is the direction we are going, and everyone else agreed. The Doritos spirits are operating in a similar register of “what was the meeting like,” because vacuum-distilled nacho cheese flavor as a luxury product requires a pitch that went through multiple rounds of approval. Multiple people read that brief and signed off on it, and none of them stopped it, because the era of stopping things is simply over.

The Babybel and Candy Land collab is the gentlest entry in this gallery and is doing something quite sophisticated, which is using the nostalgia of a childhood board game to reframe cheese as aspirational. That is not an accident. That is strategy. The Nike and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Dunky packaging, a sneaker inside an ice cream tub, is strategy of a different order, which is “the packaging is the product” energy taken to its natural conclusion.

What all of these collaborations share is an understanding that the product itself is not really the point anymore. The conversation is the point. The screenshot is the point. The “wait, is this real?” moment is the point. Every single one of these brands understood that, leaned into it completely, and produced something that nobody needed and everyone has an opinion about. That, at this point in the timeline, is the highest form of marketing achievement available.