Strategically designed partnerships can create a revenue-enhancing synergy that boosts loyalty and devotion for the participating brands. In this ongoing series, Amy Farsht, The Lacek Group’s loyalty partnerships practice lead, spotlights examples of brands that are capturing our attention, exploring new approaches, and shattering expectations.
The most powerful question a brand can ask before launching a partnership: What will enhance our customers’ lives?
Who
Today’s savvy customers are loyal to brands that make their lives easier, better, or more meaningful—not necessarily to brands that simply show up in the right places. This loyalty is built on a foundation of mutual understanding and a belief that the brand truly understands them and cares about their experience.
Pain points—moments of friction, frustration, and disconnection—can quietly but inexorably erode customers’ trust in a brand and, by extension, their desire to remain loyal. So partnerships that effectively ease those pain points are a vital part of building and maintaining Brand Devotion, our term for the emotional connections at the heart of loyalty.
What
Most partnership opportunities are evaluated primarily using quantitative measures, such as audience overlap, brand equity, and customer acquisition. But the partnerships getting our attention right now aren’t the biggest or most expensive. They’re the brand collaborations designed to meet human needs—the partnerships that identify a real problem and unite the right partners to solve it. When brands do that well, they don’t just earn customers, they build lasting loyalty.
Where
Here are four collaborations that illustrate how solving a pain point can build a solid, mutually beneficial brand partnership.
From click-weary and unsure to well-dressed
Pain point:
Online apparel shopping is full of moments that break the experience: being redirected mid-browse, reentering payment details on yet another site, distrusting the accuracy of product information, not to mention persistent anxieties about fit and quality. These aren’t minor inconveniences—they’re common reasons online carts are abandoned.
Partnership solution:
Popular apparel retailer Gap partnered with Google to create instant checkout opportunities for shoppers using Google Gemini, the platform’s AI assistant, and Google Pay.
Allowing shoppers to discover and buy Gap products directly within Gemini means avoiding a disjointed customer journey, e.g., redirection to a Gap site or tedious reentry of shipping or payment details. Gap provides product data directly to Gemini—allowing it to display verified information, not crawled content—so customers can trust what they see.
The retailer plans to integrate an AI-powered sizing tool called Bold Metrics to help shoppers choose the right size as they shop online. The tool aims to ease worries about fit while reducing returns and building purchase confidence.
Loyalty payoff:
Trust and convenience, delivered consistently, are retail’s most underrated loyalty builders. With this partnership, Gap demonstrates respect for its customers’ time and understanding of their digital behavior—positioning itself as forward-thinking and genuinely customer-first.
From overwhelmed to confident
Pain point:
Spending time outdoors is a common wellness aspiration, but getting geared up for outdoor pursuits like backpacking can be overwhelming. Too much necessary gear (or perhaps unnecessary gear?), apparently endless options, conflicting advice, and the fear of being underprepared or uncomfortable on the trail—these are some of the top challenges for new and casual hikers, who can easily get lost in the gap between inspiration and hike day.
Partnership solution:
AllTrails, a popular app, provides trusted, curated trail information across difficulty levels. REI delivers handpicked, expert-vetted gear recommendations directly within the context of the AllTrails app—spotlighting the right kit for the right trail at the right expertise level. The partners designed clear, actionable gear guides, and even skill-based starter packs, to reduce decision paralysis. The partnership meets customers as they plan their hike, removing the need for exhaustive research across multiple sources.
Loyalty payoff:
AllTrails and REI become indispensable partners in the customer’s outdoor journey—as brands they depend on, not just buy from. By making the passion more accessible and the preparation less daunting, both brands turn casual hikers into committed, returning customers. Together, the brands deliver confidence, a powerful driver of loyalty, before their customers even step onto the trailhead.
From awkward to effortless
Pain point:
Mindful consumption of alcohol or abstaining completely are fast-growing consumer trends—for example, the popular Dry January movement. Data shows customers are interested: 20% of Americans already purchase alcohol-free drinks at restaurants, and nearly half of younger diners (53% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials) pay attention to which venues offer quality NA options.
But our social infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with new thinking about alcohol consumption. Choosing not to drink and leaning into nonalcoholic (NA) beers and mocktails too often means few appealing options at restaurants or other gathering places.
Partnership solution:
To help address this growing trend, the popular restaurant search and reservation app OpenTable teamed up with Athletic Brewing Company, the largest dedicated NA brewer in the United States. They created an interactive map to help customers discover restaurants that serve Athletic Brewing’s products.
The partnership transformed the restriction of Dry January into a month of potential discovery—new places, new experiences, and even newly launched products. To sweeten the opportunity, a promotional $5 rebate on an Athletic Brewing product rewarded customers for giving the interactive map a try.
Loyalty payoff:
Mapping and sharing which social gathering places offer NA options is a powerful customer acquisition tool. OpenTable and Athletic Brewing collaborated to solve the biggest barrier for NA devotees—a seamless social environment. By making it easy to find restaurants with appealing NA drink options from Athletic, they help transform a niche preference into an easy, mainstream choice. The OpenTable interactive map gives NA afficionados a simple, trustworthy method to find gathering places where they’ll feel welcomed, accepted, and seen.
From invisible to celebrated
Pain point:
In the United States, 75 million women are in perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause, with 6,000 more reaching menopause each day. But mainstream fitness programs are built for younger, premenopausal bodies. That leaves millions of women without guidance, without community, and without the clinical evidence to know if exercise will improve their experience of a changing body. As a result, many women, feeling invisible to the brands they've supported for years, step back from fitness precisely when it could benefit them most.
Partnership solution:
Fitness leader Peloton and Respin Health—a platform for holistic, personalized menopause care founded by actor Halle Berry—co-created dedicated menopause fitness content. The collection designs its programs around symptoms, not age assumptions, and the brands commissioned a study to back up their approach.
The P.R.E.S.S. Study (Peloton/Respin Exercise & Symptoms Study) followed 267 Peloton members through a tailored program of cardiovascular and strength workouts in a collection specifically curated for women in perimenopause and menopause. The eight-week period of the trial showed that 84% of participants experienced measurable symptom improvement.
Loyalty payoff:
This brand collaboration is an act of genuine recognition. Peloton and Respin came together to offer women a community platform that transforms menopause from solitary, invisible, and stigmatized to a mutual and celebrated experience that encourages customers to become passionate brand advocates.
Why
Pain points are powerful—but deeply underused—data to inform and even inspire partnership strategies. Brands should continually ask: What do our customers need that they aren’t getting? What customer challenge can we solve with a brand partner? These questions and the insights they can reveal are a strong starting place to find the right partnerships—i.e., brand collaborations that will build and sustain Brand Devotion, loyalty that endures.
How
Map your customer journey. Find the moments of friction, the gaps in experience, the audiences being overlooked. Your next great partnership may live there.
You can read more about creating results-oriented partnerships in our Lacek Playbook: Strategic Partnerships. Also consider these four guideposts to help your team build a partnership around a problem.
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Lead with empathy. The best partnerships begin with a deep understanding of customers’ lived experience.
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Focus on complementary strengths. Find partners whose capabilities combine with your brand’s strengths to solve something neither could address alone.
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Meet customers in context. Offer solutions for the exact moment and place of friction in your customer experience.
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Embrace the loyalty domino effect. Solving a problem for customers engenders trust. Trust invites customer retention and brand advocacy, which fuel brand love and lasting devotion—the real ROI of partnerships that solve pain points.
Loyalty isn’t built in the moments when everything goes right. It’s created in the moments when brands step in to smooth the way.
That said, the strongest brand partnerships don’t just solve a problem. More importantly, they authentically convey: We see you, we hear you, and we’re here for you.
Amy Farsht is a VP, Strategy & Partnerships, with The Lacek Group’s Strategic Services team. For more than 30 years, The Lacek Group has been perfecting the art and algorithms of brand devotion. We help world-class brands identify their highest-potential customers, engage them across channels throughout their lifecycles, personalize each relationship for optimal long-term results, and measure the true effectiveness of those efforts. The Lacek Group is an Ogilvy One company.
