9 Brand Marketing Examples: B2B, B2C And D2C

To build a successful business in today’s fiercely competitive market, brand marketing is necessary.

With the increasing accessibility of online resources, your target market has an abundance of options. Having a distinct brand marketing strategy can help you stand out and establish a powerful position for your business.

A well-mapped-out brand marketing strategy develops a unified message that resonates with your targeted customers. It elicits an emotional response and heightens your chances of closing sales.

But creating an effective marketing strategy is a layered process and can seem intimidating.

There is no concrete recipe for the ideal brand marketing strategy. It needs innovation and creativity to customize one for your brand. You have to test different tactics, opt for several approaches, and navigate through the roadblocks of each before settling on a plan that works.

To help you draw some inspiration, here are the top nine brand marketing examples of renowned brands that actually work.

B2B brand marketing examples

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a renowned name in the marketing field, offering sales, marketing, and customer service software services. Besides being a credible source of information, the brand has established itself as a well-known name for content marketers all over the world.

They focus their brand marketing efforts on conveying a consistent brand message through a helpful and human approach.

The highlight of their marketing strategy playbook is their inbound marketing techniques. The founders — Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, wanted to see authenticity in product reviews and access to unbiased information.

They used this as an opportunity to change the course of marketing and started applying what’s now known as an inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound marketing does not pitch a sale to a customer. Instead, it addresses their pain points, offers a solution to the consumer, and helps them discover the product on their own.

HubSpot uses inbound marketing methods in two segments: content strategy and ad strategy.

As part of their content marketing strategy, HubSpot focuses on SEO optimization and creates content that is opinionated and inspires long-term business-customer relationships.

The brand’s goal was to make strategic marketing accessible for smaller businesses and startups who don’t have huge budgets to send outbound campaigns.

What started as a small organization offering consultation for inbound marketing to startups grew and started gaining big corporations as clients. By 2010, HubSpot’s revenue grew to $15.6 million.

HubSpot also released multiple free tools for inbound marketing, which promoted their brand further, creating brand awareness and widening their client base.

2. Adobe

Adobe is an American multinational software corporation that revolutionized digital design and illustrations. The company specializes in the creation and publication of a wide range of content, photography, illustration, animation, video, and print.

In its brand marketing strategy, Adobe prioritizes segmentation. It divides the general market palace into smaller parts according to their comparable attributes, online behaviour, socio-financial background, etc.

Adobe segments the clients on essential demographic criteria, profits of the potential purchaser, and lifestyles cycle degree. This helps the brand target customers accurately and delivers personalized campaigns.

The company’s marketing campaigns reflect the software’s creative abilities. They communicate how Adobe helps consumers realize their creativity easily.

Every Adobe campaign delivers a clear brand message centered on creativity and expression. The brand leverages customer data to drive a fully programmatic advertising strategy. It also ensures the quality of experience or control by measuring and boosting campaign performance consistently.

Adobe also ventured into influencer marketing to increase brand visibility. For example, Adobe partnered with Billie Eilish and produced an ad that reflects the dilemma of creativity and how the software helps you with it. The brand also collaborated with the artist on her Album ‘Happier Than Ever’, which was created using Adobe creative cloud.

The brand also invests in social media marketing. It has active profiles on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, with a significant following. However, Adobe focuses on LinkedIn marketing the most. It shares an average of 3 posts each day that inform the audience and promote the brand at the same time.

3. Salesforce

Salesforce is a B2B company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) software. It helps businesses make use of powerful and innovative technologies, like cloud, mobile, social, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, to connect and engage with customers.

The brand invests a significant amount in its sales and marketing efforts. Salesforce uses a combination of traditional and social marketing channels to target different customer segments.

It conducts multichannel marketing campaigns, including email, social media, web marketing, television commercials, etc., and delivers a broader customer journey.

Salesforce also runs in-person and virtual customer events to create brand awareness. It organizes proprietary events such as Dreamforce and virtual Dreamforce to You, World Tours, etc. The brand also participates in trade shows and industry events.

Salesforce launched its streaming platform Salesforce+, which discusses educational content to learn new skills and pursue new career opportunities, future technologies, and other important content.

They use creative and on-brand ads featuring influential personalities and events. For example, Salesforce produced the above ad that features Matthew McConaughey.

Salesforce also uses customer testimonials to establish credibility with new audiences. The brand partnered with Formula 1 and produced a video for Salesforce+ that discusses the sport’s transformation to a modern event through effective marketing.

B2C brand marketing examples

4. Nike

Nike is a brand that needs no introduction. Their Iconic ‘Just Do It’ slogan resonates with millions of people around the world.

Besides offering top-quality athletic footwear, apparel, and equipment, Nike made fitness look accessible to everyone. They have built an easily recognizable business through strong branding and consistent brand messaging.

Nike’s first attempt at brand marketing focused on leveraging the brand’s origin story. Bill Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike, is also the man who made jogging a craze in the ’60s and ’70s.

That’s where the brand’s mission originated. Nike aims to make fitness a lifestyle not only among sports people and athletes but also among the common people.

Their ideology of empowerment and self-improvement is the brand’s USP — and Nike maintains this consistently across all its marketing channels.

Nike’s social media posts never endorse the brand's products directly. Instead, they focus on maintaining the perception of a progressive brand within the fitness industry. They do not limit their ad collaborations to athletes. Nike makes it a point to represent the common crowd through its marketing and portray a body-positive and inclusive image.

Nike’s offline campaigns focus on issues of national importance. For example, the above ad puts the spotlight on women of colour in sports. Nike highlights its inclusive brand persona by talking about the unfair treatment of women of colour.

Each campaign is customer-centric and tells a story that triggers emotion. Nike’s marketing makes people resonate with its mission of overcoming adversity. Despite facing several competitors, Nike kept its position as a top brand by delivering relatable brand marketing.

5. Apple

As a pioneer in the gadget and tech world, Apple created a strong brand through innovative products, a sleek and minimalist design aesthetic, and a loyal user base.

Instead of trying to fit into the norm, the brand embraced its uniqueness from the very beginning. Through its innovative approach, Apple crafted a marketing campaign that many brands still aspire to achieve.

One of Apple’s genius takes on brand marketing is its ‘Think Different’ campaign. The phrase “think different” is not grammatically correct, since an adverb does not follow the word “think”. It delivers the message of innovation and creativity, and that’s exactly why the campaign was touted as successful.

Apple chose bold thinkers and norm breakers to feature in their campaign. Personalities like Albert Hitchcock, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and others were used as the faces of the campaign.

Apple develops gadgets that differ from the other available options. The design is minimal and sleek. These qualities gained the brand a very loyal following and still help it remain at the top of its industry.

6. Starbucks

Starbucks is a premium coffee and beverage brand that has experienced phenomenal global expansion. Its strong brand identity has elevated it from a coffee-selling company to a regular lifestyle addition.

Starbucks’s distinct marketing strategy is based on three pillars: consistent branding, exceptional customer service, and high-quality coffee.

Their priority in marketing lies in their consistent and high-quality products. Every time you order at Starbucks, the quality remains unmatched. Their green logo and white cups are statement traits of the brand that make it instantly recognizable.

The brand’s core customers comprise a mostly urban, health-conscious, and class-conscious crowd. To accommodate them, Starbucks offers a comfortable and inviting atmosphere throughout its outlets.

Starbucks conducts proactive social media promotions on Facebook and Instagram. They promote products through contests, hashtags, and other promotions. They even regularly posts their products as it is or with their brand fanatics posing with them.

The brand also runs paid ads through TV commercials and print media. No matter what channel they use, the brand message remains consistent every time.

Starbucks offers reward programs to existing customers to encourage them to stay loyal to the brand. With seasonal offers and festive menus, Starbucks leverages every viable opportunity to engage with its customers innovatively.

D2C brand marketing examples

7. Casper

Casper is a D2C company that sells comfortable mattresses and sleep products directly to consumers, eliminating commission-driven, inflated prices. The brand disrupted a highly crowded industry and ‌changed the selling pattern of mattresses by presenting it as a product suitable for e-commerce.

Usually, buying a mattress without touching it seems like a bad idea. Still, through its humorous and relatable marketing approach, Casper convinced its target market to do exactly that.

With smart content marketing, they established trust and built the image of an expert in their field.

Casper also eliminated the need for on-site salespeople by carrying out robust referral programs. It leverages social proof and peer recommendations by offering rewards to customers for advocating for the brand. For example, Casper offers a $75 amazon gift card for every successful referral and a 10% discount on the purchased product for the referred customer.

8. Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club offers razors and other personal grooming products directly to its customers. In recent years, the brand has seen exceptional growth in brand awareness and customer acquisition.

The secret to this success is their humorous, irrelevant, and seemingly ridiculous approach to brand marketing.

For example, the above ad is hilariously entertaining and piques the interest of a potential customer to explore the brand.

This unique approach is not new to their market strategy. Dollar Shaving Club adopted this method from its very first commercial.

The fascinating part of their marketing success is that they built a brand almost entirely through video marketing. About 12,000 new consumers signed up for DSC subscription memberships within 48 hours of them releasing their first ad. Their total number of customers rose to 330,000 by the following year.

9. Glossier

As a D2C skincare and beauty brand, Glossier’s ascent to a billion-dollar company results from its smart marketing strategy.

Originating from a beauty blog, the company built a strong social media presence and adopted a community-driven approach to product development and marketing.

Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, noticed how brands were not focusing on customer input in the beauty industry. So she directed her blog’s brand marketing strategy to a customer-based approach and continued this after launching her own brand.

To build meaningful relationships with its target audience, Glossier uses micro-influencer marketing. Instead of reposting videos of renowned influencers, they routinely check what real users post about their products and post them as beauty routines.

Glossier’s approach to marketing is authentic, which played a big factor in establishing its credibility in the beauty industry and made it a $1.2 billion company.

Conclusion

The value of your business ultimately boils down to the USP of your brand. With creative and captivating brand marketing, you can highlight these values and drive customer acquisition.

However, your branding strategy must align with your business objectives, values, and target market. Understand your customers, learn from your competitors, and devise a strategy that tells your story.

Brand marketing is not a short-term plan. But with focus, patience, and the right insight, you can create long-lasting brand loyalty.

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