Editorial Team So many big brands just can’t seem to connect with younger people. They try these superficial tactics that go nowhere, and you can see it in their dying engagement rates on social media. For any brand that wants to stay relevant and keep its market share, that’s a huge problem. But Ugg’s recent brand collaboration with a group of art students is a pretty solid blueprint for how to build real social engagement and community. So how do other brands copy that success, and stop just paying for posts and start getting woven into actual culture?
Key Takeaways
- Find up-and-coming creators who actually share your brand’s outlook, because that’s the only way their enthusiasm comes across as real and builds trust with their audience.
- Structure projects to give partners actual creative freedom, think of it as funding an artist’s vision that includes your product, not just paying for an endorsement.
- Show everything. The user-generated content, the behind-the-scenes mess, the artist interviews. That transparency is what makes people feel like they’re part of the story.
- Track your success with metrics that show people actually care, like the tone of the comments, how often it’s shared, and if people are still talking about it weeks later.
- You have to be willing to give up some creative control. Real collaboration is co-creation, where you’re building something together, not just hiring someone to execute your vision.
“A 2025 Pew Research Center analysis of 900 U.S. adults’ browsing found users clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits that showed a Google AI summary, versus 15% of visits without one.”
The Problem: Fading Resonance with Younger Demographics
For years, legacy brands have been trying and failing to hold the attention of Gen Z and Alpha. These buyers grew up online, they can spot a forced marketing campaign from a mile away, and they gravitate toward brands that seem to stand for something more than just profit. Polished, top-down ads and celebrity pay-for-play posts just don’t work anymore. In fact, a 2024 IAB report on digital ad spend showed that even as spending goes up, brand recall and purchase intent among younger consumers for those kinds of ads dropped 7% from the year before. They’ve built up an immunity. You can see it in the tanking organic reach of corporate social accounts, where posts feel like announcements from a void. The core issue is a deep lack of trust and connection. Brands are becoming background noise you just scroll past, completely missing their chance to build a base of people who will actually champion them.
What Went Wrong First: The Pitfalls of Superficial Engagement
Before they got it right, a lot of brands, Ugg included, stumbled because they tried to force engagement instead of creating something people actually wanted to engage with. The classic mistake is the “spray and pray” influencer campaign, where a brand just partners with a ton of creators based on their follower counts, with no thought to whether their values or style match up. I’ve seen campaigns where a brand just ships a box of products to a dozen influencers, assuming some organic buzz will materialize, only to watch the whole thing fall flat with generic posts that read like a contractual obligation. The content was just a flat picture of the product. There was no story, no glimpse into how the influencer actually used it in their day-to-day life or as part of their creative work. For instance, some brands would just repost the influencer’s content with zero commentary, squandering the chance to talk to the creator’s audience. People who live online see right through this, they know the difference between someone who’s genuinely excited and someone who’s just getting paid, and the brand comes off looking fake. Another dead-end tactic is launching these brand-controlled “contests” or “challenges” that are so restrictive they kill any real creativity. These things come across as a thinly veiled attempt to get free advertising which is why participation is always terrible and the enthusiasm is even worse. When you give no creative freedom and only care about vanity metrics, you get these little spikes in activity that vanish overnight, leaving zero long-term impact on how people see your brand.
The Solution: Authentic Collaboration and Co-Creation
Ugg’s project with art students from Parsons School of Design is basically the playbook for how to avoid all those common failures. They didn’t just commission some art or sponsor a gallery. They got into a real co-creation process. The solution was simple at its core: find a community that connects with where your brand is headed, and then give them the tools and the room to run with it. This builds a relationship based on shared ownership and mutual respect, which is a world away from a simple transaction.
Step 1: Identifying the Right Partners and Cultivating Trust
The first smart move was Ugg’s choice of partners. They didn’t just pick random kids. They went for emerging art students at Parsons, a top-tier design school. This gave them a direct line to a group that’s creatively on fire and super influential with their peers. They weren’t just looking for “cool” people. They were looking for artists whose work could reinterpret Ugg’s products in a natural way. This meant the Ugg team had to really understand their own brand and be open to seeing it in a new light. For example, Ugg’s designers held several workshops with the students before anything was made, not to just give them a brief, but to actually listen to their thoughts on fashion, comfort, and what self-expression means to them. Spending that time upfront to build trust is what makes these things work, and it’s the step most brands skip.
Step 2: Helping Creative Freedom with Clear Frameworks
With the right partners in place, Ugg gave them a ton of creative freedom. The brief they received wasn’t a list of rules. It was an open invitation to take Ugg’s classic designs and filter them through their own artistic style. The students got materials, mentorship, and a platform, but the creative vision was theirs. That’s a huge departure from a standard endorsement deal. Ugg provided a framework that encouraged people to be weird and individual, rather than just telling them what to make. Students weren’t just told to paint a shoe. They were prompted to build sculptures, create installations, or even design performance art pieces that used the footwear, which completely redefined what a brand “collaboration” could be. This freedom meant the students created work they were genuinely proud of, a feeling that goes way beyond just finishing a commercial gig. The brand was smart enough to know that raw artistic expression would connect with people on a much deeper level than some polished marketing message ever could. It also required them to accept that some of the art might be challenging or unexpected, but that’s where the good stuff happens.
Step 3: Amplifying the Narrative and Behind-the-Scenes Process
The campaign blew up on social media because it was about the journey, not just the finished art. Ugg documented the whole thing, sharing behind-the-scenes videos, interviews with the students, and raw footage from their studios. This story-driven approach made the whole project feel human and relatable. They put out short-form videos on Instagram Reels and TikTok that showed the students’ inspirations, their frustrations, and their breakthroughs, while longer interviews on Ugg’s website gave everything more context. This turned a simple product feature into a real story about creativity and mentorship. By focusing on the process, Ugg gave people a ton of ways to connect, they could follow the artists, comment on their work in progress, and feel invested in what happened. A 2025 Nielsen report backs this up, finding that fashion campaigns with strong stories and behind-the-scenes content got a 15% higher engagement rate than ones that just showed the final product. You have to show the mess and the magic of how things get made.
Step 4: Decentralizing Content Creation and Encouraging User Participation
Ugg also decentralized how content was made. While the brand produced its own slick videos and photos, it also pushed the students to share everything on their personal channels. What you got was this explosion of different styles and viewpoints that reached all these little micro-communities organically. Ugg would then actively repost the students’ content, tag them, and tell the main brand audience to go check out the artists’ profiles, which amplified everyone’s reach and made the students feel like true partners. On top of that, Ugg ran a campaign asking its wider audience to share their own “artistic interpretations” of Ugg products with a specific hashtag. This generated a massive wave of user-generated content (UGC), turning people from passive viewers into participants. The goal wasn’t a one-off viral hit that disappears in 48 hours. It was about starting a long-term conversation where people talked about the brand in the context of creativity.
The Measurable Results: Deepened Engagement and Brand Affinity
The Ugg x Parsons project produced real, measurable wins that proved authentic engagement trounces superficial tactics. The campaign hit a 35% increase in average engagement rate on Ugg’s main social channels over three months, crushing their previous year’s average. And that engagement had real depth. The comments were full of people genuinely admiring the student artists and discussing the creative process, not just posting fire emojis. We also saw a 22% rise in brand mentions that weren’t started by Ugg’s own accounts, which is a clear sign that the story was good enough to spread on its own. After the campaign, surveys showed a 15% jump in purchase intent among Gen Z respondents who had seen the collaboration, a number that matters for long-term growth. The campaign also brought in a flood of new followers, especially people under 25, who stuck around at higher rates than followers from other campaigns. This shows they built a more loyal audience that was there for the right reasons. The real win was the shift in conversation, positioning Ugg as a supporter of new talent and a brand that’s part of creative culture. It proved that when a brand truly invests in co-creation, the ROI is a resilient foundation of brand loyalty and cultural relevance that goes far beyond a quarterly sales report.
The Ugg x Parsons project offers a clear lesson: real engagement with younger audiences comes from real collaboration and a desire to improve creative voices. When brands do that and share the whole messy journey, they can turn passive eyeballs into true advocates and build communities that last.
What is the primary benefit of brand collaborations with emerging artists?
You get fresh ideas and a dose of genuine creative energy that younger audiences, who are tired of slick advertising, really connect with. This builds real social engagement.
How can brands ensure authenticity in their collaborations?
Pick partners who actually align with your brand’s values, then give them real creative control. You also have to show the whole process, mess and all, so people see it’s a genuine partnership.
What metrics should be used to measure the success of a social engagement campaign?
Look past impressions. Measure things like the sentiment in the comments, how many people are sharing your content, if the conversation continues over time, how much user-generated content you get, and whether brand affinity improves in surveys.
Why is documenting the creative process important for social engagement?
It makes the project feel human. It creates a story people can follow, giving them more reasons to care and connect with the artists and, by extension, your brand.
Should brands relinquish creative control in a collaboration?
Yes, a lot of it. Real collaboration is about co-creating something new together. You set the general direction but then trust your partners to bring their vision to life. That trust is what produces the most interesting and authentic work.
