Corporate Marketing Done Differently | 10 Exceptional Examples
Most times corporate marketing is boring as fuck. Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s the truth. How many more stupid logo pens or whatever tchotchkes do companies need to hand out before we collectively say enough is enough?
Maybe your company doesn’t create “sexy products” or the industry you work in lacks that sizzle, but we all know that’s just a convenient excuse for all the lazy mechanical thinkers to hide behind. The vast majority of businesses are mundane in nature. They don’t have a built-in marketing advantage, so its the corporate marketers that need to find a way to change how people think about XYZ company.
Corporate marketing is a type of marketing that promotes the company as a whole, as opposed to individual products. Ultimately, the main goal of corporate marketing is to improve your brand image, while strengthening relationships with your customers so they become brand advocates. When corporate marketing is working correctly, it should keep the flywheel spinning by attracting new customers, while engaging leads, and delighting current customers.
For most companies, corporate marketing is performed through some played out tactic or strategy like…
- writing company blog posts or press releases
- posting beige ass shit on corporate social media accounts
- putting logos on the weirdest giveaway items
- creating regular investor reports (if publicly-traded)
What about the companies that do corporate marketing differently?
That’s what I want to focus on throughout this piece of content. These ten companies thought bigger than their products. They ultimately created an impactful corporate marketing strategy that found a hook that allowed them to better tell their own company stories.
Macy’s Day Parade
How many of you woke up on Thanksgiving Day as a child excited to see the huge balloons on TV? How many of you still do that today? 🙋♂️
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world’s largest parade. It started in 1924 and has been televised nationally on NBC since 1953. The famous balloons were introduced in 1928, replacing live zoo animals. The large animal-shaped balloons were produced by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company through 1980.
Up until the current pandemic era live crowd restrictions, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade would bring 3 to 4 million attendees to watch the 2.5 mile route from the Upper West Side and ending outside Macy’s Herald Square flagship store. More than 44 million people typically watch the parade on television on an annual basis. In 2020, the first ever live international broadcast of the parade occurred in the Philippines.
Goodyear Blimp
Growing up in Northeast Ohio, I remember getting excited every time I would randomly catch a glimpse of the Goodyear Blimp flying overhead.
In 1916, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company began building zeppelin aircrafts for United States military during World War I. Upon World War I’s conclusion, Goodyear continued to manufacture zeppelins but they were used mostly to advertise its products. The maiden voyage for the first Goodyear Blimp was in 1924 called the Pilgrim.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Goodyear airships commonly appeared at major sporting events. It was once famously said that “imagining football without the Goodyear Blimp would be kind of sad. It has become part of our national consciousness.” In January 2019, the College Football Hall of Fame inducted the Goodyear Blimp as its first-ever non-human inductee.
MICHELIN Guide
The tire companies of the early 1900s must have had some special marketers because French tire company Michelin also had an epic corporate marketing strategy.
In 1900, there were fewer than 3,000 cars on the roads of France. To increase the demand for cars and, accordingly, car tires, car tire manufacturer Michelin published a guide for French motorists, called the Michelin Guide. It provided information to motorists, such as maps, tire repair and replacement instructions, listings of car mechanics, hotels, and gas stations throughout France. In the early 1920s, they also made several changes, notably listing restaurants by specific categories and removing advertisements in the guide.
Recognizing the growing popularity of the restaurant section of the guide, Michelin recruited a team of inspectors to visit and review restaurants, who were always anonymous. This is the core of the Guide today that awards up to three Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.
Corporate “Annual Events”
Almost every “large company” throws some type of annual event, but few have reached any level of cultural significance. A few that come to mind…
- Tesla Battery Day or Giga Fest
- Salesforce Dreamforce
- Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
- Apple Special Event or Worldwide Developers Conference
These corporate “experiential events” have become the stuff of legend. They aren’t just for product launches, but command the attention of a global audience and define entire industries. The impact of a well-produced, story-driven event reinforcing the trajectory of a business is truly limitless.
Red Bull Flugtag
Is Red Bull a beverage brand with a great media strategy or a media company that just so happens to be the category creator (and market leader) of packaged energy drinks?
I could have listed a handful of different Red Bull corporate marketing events, but I went with Flugtag because I think it’s the single greatest representation of it. With the famous marketing tag line of Red Bull being “it gives you wings” and flugtag being the German word for flight day…this is just pure genius…
The first Red Bull Flugtag event was first held thirty years ago in Vienna, Austria. It was such a success that it has been held every year since, and in now over 35 cities all over the world. The largest known attendance was during the 2012 event in Cape Town, South Africa with 220,000 attending. The events are also watched by the millions on YouTube and streamed on devices like Apple TV.
For those unfamiliar, competitors attempt to fly home-made, human-powered flying machines that are usually launched off a pier of about 30 ft high into a body of water. Most competitors enter for the entertainment value, and the flying machines rarely fly at all.
Guinness World Records
While the Michelin Guide was created to sell more tires, the Guinness Book of World Records was created to sell more beer. In November 1951, the managing director of the Guinness Breweries got in an argument over the fastest game bird in Europe. He realized that there must have been numerous other questions debated nightly at pubs across the world, but there was no book with which to settle arguments about records.
The first Guinness Book of World Records was given out in 1954 and then officially updated and sold in 1955. Today, Guinness World Records is a global brand. The 2022 edition is now published in 100 countries and 23 languages, and maintains over 53,000 records in its database.
Corporate “Sales Holidays”
This corporate marketing strategy can be seen in two different methods. The first is with corporations creating “sales holidays” that are not directly branded…
- National Pancake Day = IHOP
- Small Business Saturday = American Express
- National Friendship Day = Hallmark
The second is with corporations creating massive cultural sales events that are directly branded. The most famous American example would be Amazon Prime Day. This “sales holiday” came to life on July 15, 2015, as a way to celebrate Prime members on Amazon’s 20th birthday. In its seventh-year (2021), Amazon reached a record performance on Prime Day by reportedly hitting $11.2 billion in global sales.
IBM Deep Blue
Development for Deep Blue (or what was originally known as Deep Thought), a chess-playing supercomputer, began development by IBM in 1985. Twelve years later, it became the first computer to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. The chess match received massive media coverage around the world, as it was the classic plot line of man vs. machine. Behind the contest, however, was important computer science. It’s credited as pushing forward the ability of computers and is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence.
The Deep Blue project inspired a more recent grand challenge at IBM. This was around building a computer that could beat the champions at a more complicated game, Jeopardy!. In February 2011, Watson (which is what the project is known as today) took on two of the all-time most successful human players of the game and beat them in front of millions of television viewers. The technology in Watson demonstrated that a whole new generation of human and machine interactions will be possible.
Gatorade Celebration Showers
Everyone likely knows the origin story of Gatorade, but what about the sports celebration of dumping a cooler full of the sports drink on the winning coach.
The first known instance of such a Gatorade victory shower was when New York Giant’s player Jim Burt dumping a cooler of Gatorade over coach Bill Parcells in a 1984 game against the Redskins. This dousing would become something of a tradition after every win for the Giants. It was the 1986 season, in which Parcells was doused 17 times, that really thrust the practice into the national spotlight thanks to the final dumping after the Giant’s Super Bowl victory, ultimately seeing the Gatorade shower gain widespread adoption. Now, you can make a prop bet each Super Bowl on which color of Gatorade will be dumped on the winning NFL team coach.
El Arroyo Sign
I know all these mentions of corporate marketing done differently have been from large companies (or at least they are from current valuations), but I wanted to provide some inspiration from a local small business. Since 1975, El Arroyo has enticed Tex-Mex lovers with its gargantuan proportions and ice-cold margarita, but more recently for another reason. If you’ve lived in Austin, TX, visited the city, or just like social media meme accounts, you have likely seen the El Arroyo sign. You might even follow its Instagram page that boasts more than 500 thousand followers.
Current owners say the sign tradition keeps people connected with the restaurant and they know many people drive by there every day just to see what it says. While the tone of the sign’s humor and sarcasm is remarkably consistent, its content is not the product of one person but rather a group of about 15 people including the owners and managers who collaborate on ideas over email.
Final Thoughts
If those weren’t enough, how about one idea that isn’t a reality yet, but should be? In a recent post-game interview, Giannis Antetokounmpo broke down his first Oreo dunking experience [it’s hilarious btw]. Despite the 2022 version of the NBA Slam Dunk Contest being one of the worst in history, I think Mondelez International (with its owned snacking brand Oreo) should replace AT&T as the title sponsor. The annual NBA Dunk Contest brought to you by Oreo seems so obvious, right?
