Innovative Marketing in 2025: What the Best Brands Are Doing

The most innovative marketing in 2025 is not the loudest. It is the most precise. The brands getting results this year have figured out how to combine sharper positioning, smarter creative decisions, and a more honest read of what their customers actually want, without chasing every new platform or format that gets written up in a trade press roundup.

What separates the examples worth studying from the ones that just win awards is simple: they solved a real business problem. Not a brand awareness problem in the abstract. A specific, commercially measurable problem with a clear answer at the end of it.

Why Innovation in Marketing Is Mostly a Distraction

I spent a long time in agency environments where innovation was the product being sold. Every year there was a new capability, a new channel, a new format that clients were told they needed to be part of. Some of it was genuinely useful. Most of it was revenue generation dressed up as strategic counsel.

The honest version of what I saw, across 30 industries and hundreds of millions in managed spend, is that the brands doing the best work were rarely the ones doing the newest things. They were the ones doing the right things consistently, and being disciplined enough to ignore the noise around them.

That framing matters when you look at 2025. There is a lot of noise. AI-generated content at scale, short-form video saturation, retail media network proliferation, the ongoing identity crisis of social platforms. Brands that are winning this year have made choices about what to ignore as much as what to pursue.

If you want to understand what genuinely strong brand strategy looks like underneath these examples, the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub covers the structural thinking that the best campaigns are built on. The examples below are the output. The strategy is the input.

Brands Using Positioning as a Competitive Weapon

Positioning is not a slide in a brand deck. It is a decision about what you will and will not be, and it only works if it holds under commercial pressure. The brands worth studying in 2025 have used positioning as an active competitive tool, not a background document.

Liquid Death is the obvious example and has been for a few years now, but what makes it interesting in 2025 is the durability. The brand has not pivoted. It has not softened its edges to chase mainstream acceptance. It has stayed deliberately odd, and that consistency is now a structural advantage because competitors cannot copy the positioning without looking like they are copying the positioning. The irreverence is baked into every touchpoint, from the product name to the can design to the social content, and it works because it was built to be coherent, not just provocative.

On the B2B side, Notion has done something similar. It positioned itself not as a productivity tool but as a workspace that reflects how people actually think, and it let the community build the proof of that positioning for them. The marketing budget went into the product and the ecosystem, not into broadcast advertising. The result is a brand that feels earned rather than manufactured.

BCG’s work on the most recommended brands identified years ago that the brands people talk about positively share a common trait: they have a clear point of view that is consistent across every customer interaction. That finding has not aged. If anything, it has become more important as the number of channels has multiplied and the cost of inconsistency has increased.

Community as a Marketing Channel, Not a PR Exercise

Community-led growth has been discussed for years and executed badly by most brands that attempted it. In 2025, a smaller number of brands are doing it properly, and the difference is visible in retention and lifetime value metrics, not just engagement rates.

The brands doing community well have understood one thing: community is not an audience management exercise. It is a product decision. The community has to be genuinely useful to the people in it, not just a channel for the brand to push messages through. When brands treat community as a broadcast medium with a comment section, it dies. When they treat it as a service, it compounds.

Gymshark is a good example. Its community strategy has evolved from influencer partnerships into something closer to a genuine fitness ecosystem, with content, challenges, and in-person events that serve the audience’s actual interests. The brand is present in the community, but it is not the centre of it. That distinction matters enormously.

Moz has written about how local brand loyalty is built through consistent community relevance, and the same principle applies at scale. Loyalty is not manufactured by loyalty programmes. It is earned by being consistently useful to a specific group of people over time.

I ran an agency that grew from 20 to 100 people over a few years, and one of the things I learned during that period is that the clients with the strongest brands were the ones who had built genuine relationships with their customers, not just awareness. They had fewer customers than some of their competitors, but the customers they had were worth considerably more over a lifetime. The community was smaller and more valuable.

First-Party Data as a Brand Advantage, Not Just a Privacy Response

The deprecation of third-party cookies has been discussed at length, mostly in the context of what brands lose. The more interesting conversation is about what the brands that prepared properly have gained.

Brands that invested early in first-party data infrastructure, email lists, loyalty programmes, direct relationships, owned content, are now operating with a targeting and personalisation capability that competitors cannot replicate through media spend alone. The data advantage is a brand advantage because it allows for relevance at scale, and relevance is what drives both conversion and retention.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider programme is a useful case. It is not a discount scheme. It is a data collection mechanism that is also genuinely useful to the customer. The brand knows what its best customers buy, when they buy it, what they respond to, and what they ignore. That knowledge informs product development, content strategy, and media investment in ways that a third-party data stack never could.

The broader point is that first-party data strategies require a brand that people actually want to have a relationship with. If the brand is not compelling, people will not share their information. The data strategy and the brand strategy are not separate workstreams. They depend on each other.

Where AI Is Being Used Well and Where It Is Not

AI in marketing is generating more heat than light at the moment, and most of the case studies being written up are either genuinely impressive or quietly misleading. It is worth being specific about where the technology is adding real value and where it is creating the illusion of innovation while delivering mediocrity at scale.

The brands using AI well in 2025 are using it for tasks where speed and volume matter and where quality can be defined and measured: ad copy variation testing, audience segmentation, content personalisation at scale, customer service triage. These are legitimate applications where AI delivers genuine efficiency gains without compromising brand integrity.

The brands using it badly are using it to generate brand content without editorial oversight, to replace strategy with output, and to cut creative investment in the name of efficiency. The result is a homogenisation of brand voice that is already visible across certain categories. When every brand in a sector is using the same underlying models to generate content, the content starts to sound the same, and the positioning that the brand spent years building gets quietly eroded.

Moz has made the point that AI use carries real risks for brand equity when it is deployed without a clear understanding of what the brand stands for. That is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for having a strong brand strategy before you decide how to use it.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which means I have seen a lot of work where the execution was impressive and the strategy was thin. AI does not change that dynamic. It amplifies it. If the brief is weak, AI will produce weak work faster and at greater volume. The constraint was never the production. It was the thinking.

The Creative Consistency Brands That Others Are Ignoring

One of the least discussed forms of marketing innovation is the decision to stop changing things. In an industry that rewards novelty, the brands that hold a consistent creative position over multiple years are doing something genuinely difficult and genuinely valuable.

Apple is the obvious example, but it is worth using because the consistency is so complete. The product launch format, the visual language, the retail experience, the tone of the advertising, all of it has been held to a standard that makes the brand instantly recognisable across any touchpoint. That consistency is not an accident. It is the result of a very clear brand strategy that is defended internally with real discipline.

Building that kind of visual coherence requires more than a style guide. It requires organisational commitment to the brand as a strategic asset, not a marketing department responsibility. MarketingProfs has written about the structural requirements for visual coherence, and the core argument holds: flexibility and durability are not opposites if the system is designed properly.

The brands that have held their positioning for three or more years in 2025 have a compound advantage. The brand associations are stronger, the creative production is more efficient because the system is established, and the audience relationship is more stable. The innovation is in the discipline, not the disruption.

Performance Marketing That Builds Brand, Not Just Conversions

The tension between brand and performance marketing has been a recurring argument in the industry for as long as I have been in it. The brands doing the most interesting work in 2025 have stopped treating it as a tension and started treating it as a design problem.

Early in my career, I ran a paid search campaign for a music festival at lastminute.com that generated six figures of revenue within roughly a day. It was a simple campaign by current standards, but what made it work was that the offer was genuinely compelling, the creative was clear, and the landing page did not get in the way. The performance was strong because the fundamentals were right, not because of sophisticated bidding or audience layering.

The same principle applies now, at greater complexity. The brands getting the best performance results in 2025 are the ones where the brand positioning is clear enough that the performance creative writes itself. The value proposition is not being invented in the ad. It is being expressed through it. That distinction matters for both conversion rates and brand perception.

Wistia makes a relevant point about the problem with focusing on brand awareness as an end in itself. Awareness without a clear value proposition is expensive and fragile. The brands that have connected their brand investment to measurable commercial outcomes, even imperfectly, are in a much stronger position than those running brand and performance as separate budget lines with separate objectives.

HubSpot’s own brand strategy is worth noting here. It built an entire content and community ecosystem that generates awareness, consideration, and conversion from a single integrated approach. The components of a comprehensive brand strategy that HubSpot describes are not theoretical. They are the architecture behind a business that has grown significantly on the back of content and brand consistency.

B2B Brands Doing Things Differently

B2B marketing has historically been the place where brand thinking goes to be strangled by procurement requirements and risk aversion. That is changing, and the brands leading the change are worth paying attention to.

Salesforce has invested in brand at a level that most B2B companies would not consider justifiable, and the return is visible in its market position. The Dreamforce conference is not a sales event. It is a brand event that happens to generate enormous commercial activity. The distinction matters because it reflects a strategic choice about what kind of company Salesforce wants to be perceived as.

At the smaller end of the market, the B2B brands doing interesting work are the ones that have figured out how to build credibility through content and community rather than through advertising spend. MarketingProfs documented a case where a B2B company went from zero brand awareness to 190 leads with a single well-executed campaign, which is a useful reminder that creative thinking and clear targeting can outperform budget in B2B contexts.

BCG’s research on aligning brand strategy with go-to-market execution makes the point that the organisations where brand and commercial strategy are integrated outperform those where they operate separately. In B2B, this integration is often the missing piece. The brand team and the sales team are working from different assumptions about what the company stands for, and the customer sees the gap.

There is more depth on how to build positioning that holds up under commercial pressure in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes section of The Marketing Juice. The B2B examples above are illustrations of principles that apply across categories.

What the Best Brands in 2025 Have in Common

Looking across the examples above, a few things are consistent. The brands doing the most effective work in 2025 have a clear, specific positioning that is held consistently across every touchpoint. They have made deliberate choices about what they will not do as well as what they will. They have invested in owned relationships with their customers rather than renting access through paid media. And they are using new tools and technologies in service of a strategy, not as a substitute for one.

None of that is new. The fundamentals of strong brand strategy have not changed. What has changed is the cost of getting them wrong. In a fragmented, noisy, AI-accelerated media environment, the brands without clear positioning are invisible. The brands with it are disproportionately visible, because they stand out against a background of homogenised content and undifferentiated messaging.

When I started in marketing, I taught myself to code to build a website because the budget was not there to pay someone else to do it. The lesson I took from that was not about resourcefulness, though that was part of it. It was about the value of understanding the mechanics of what you are doing. The brands that are winning in 2025 understand the mechanics of their own positioning well enough to make good decisions about where to invest and where to hold back. That understanding is not a technology advantage. It is a strategic one.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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