B2C marketing examples: 7 consumer brands, 7 routes

Most lists of b2c marketing examples are lists of famous ads. This one is sorted by route instead. Seven consumer companies, seven different ways of reaching people. For each one you get the move the company made, the mechanism behind it and the part a smaller company can use.

First, where this comes from. Underboss did not work on any of these campaigns and has no inside knowledge of them. They are other companies' public work, read from outside. Every fact is taken from the company's own publication or from published reporting. Each source is named in the text and linked at the end.

How to read b2c marketing campaign examples

The visible part of a campaign is rarely the part that worked. A founder copies the mascot, the joke or the celebrity, and gets none of the result. What transfers is the mechanism: why people paid attention, why they passed it on, why they came back.

So each example below is cut into three parts. The move is what the company did. The mechanism is why it worked on people. The lesson is the piece that survives when you take away the budget and the fame.

Owned short-form video: Ryanair

The move. Ryanair is a low-cost airline with a large TikTok account. In January 2023 the trade title Marketing Beat interviewed the airline's head of social media at the time. It reported more than 1.9 million TikTok followers and a social team of eight, split in two. One half makes planned, always-on content. The other reacts to the news and works the comments. On TikTok the content is unpolished on purpose.

The mechanism. The account has rules. According to the interview, each post should be entertaining, easy to understand, a little chaotic and linked to aviation. The head of social described the approach as "low cost, high reach", which is also a fair description of the airline. An idea takes about five minutes to find and two to three days to produce and approve. The format repeats, so the audience knows what it is getting and the team is never starting from a blank page.

The lesson. Write the rules of your format down before you post. Four lines is enough. A rule set lets a small team publish quickly without a debate over every video. One caution from the same interview: he said humour has to be real to the brand, and called Ryanair "a weird exception". Copy the discipline and leave the jokes.

Founder on camera: Poppi

The move. Poppi is a soda brand that began in its cofounder's kitchen. That cofounder, Allison Ellsworth, filmed herself for TikTok. Entrepreneur reported that she spent three to four months making simple videos, recipes and dances among them, before the one that changed things. In that video she told the story of pitching the company on the TV show Shark Tank while nine months pregnant. Entrepreneur reported about $100,000 in Amazon sales overnight. Fortune reported the same figure across 24 hours.

The mechanism. A founder's story is the one piece of content no competitor can make. And she had months of practice in public before the video that mattered. Fortune and Entrepreneur both reported that PepsiCo bought Poppi in 2025 for $1.95 billion. One video did not build that. It does show what a founder's face can do for a brand at the start.

The lesson. Start before you are good at it. Ellsworth's own advice, as Entrepreneur paraphrased it, is that a founder has to be willing to look foolish. Most founders wait for the perfect script. The perfect script is usually the story they have already told at forty dinners.

Creators: Dunkin' and Charli D'Amelio

The move. In September 2020, Dunkin' put a drink on its menu named after a creator. "The Charli" was Charli D'Amelio's usual order: cold brew with whole milk and caramel. Marketing Dive reported that she had 84 million TikTok followers at the time, and that for months her videos had shown her sipping a Dunkin' iced coffee. The company was formalising something that already existed. Customers could order the drink in the Dunkin' app, and a contest asked fans to recreate one of her Dunkin' moments.

The mechanism. She was a customer first. The drink gave her fans something to do beyond watching: order it, film it, post it. And the order ran through the app, so borrowed attention turned into accounts Dunkin' owns. Tubefilter relayed figures that a Dunkin' vice president gave in an interview: hundreds of thousands of the drinks sold in five days, daily app downloads up 57% on launch day, and cold brew sales up 20% that day and 45% the next. Those are the company's own numbers.

The lesson. Look for creators who already use your product before you look for creators with the biggest audience. Give them something shaped like a product: a named bundle, a flavour, a setting. Then send the demand to a channel you own, such as an app, an email list or your own accounts.

Community: Strava's clubs

The move. Strava is an app for recording runs and rides. It lets people form clubs, compare times on leaderboards and share each activity. Every year it publishes a report on what its users did. GearJunkie covered the 2024 report, which Strava built from the activity of more than 135 million people in over 190 countries plus a survey of 5,068 people. Strava reported that participation in running clubs grew 59% in 2024.

The mechanism. People stay for other people. In the survey, as GearJunkie reported it, more than half of respondents said they had made new friends through a fitness group. A Strava executive credited clubs, leaderboards and activity sharing for the sense of belonging. The yearly report does a second job. It turns the company's own data into a story that the press covers for free.

The lesson. A community is a regular thing your customers do together, and it can start very small. A weekly run from your shop. A monthly challenge with a shared hashtag. Start the habit first and build the feature later. And look at what your own data could tell the outside world once a year.

Product-led sharing: Spotify Wrapped

The move. Once a year, Spotify shows each listener a personal summary of their own year of listening. Spotify's own history of the feature says it began in 2015 as a year in review that drew more than 5 million users. It took the name Wrapped in 2016 and moved inside the app in 2019. Spotify says the 2023 edition reached 227 million monthly active users. The 2024 edition ran in 184 markets and came with cards made for sharing.

The mechanism. The product makes the content, and the content is about the customer. A person sharing their Wrapped is telling friends about their own taste. The brand is simply printed on the card. Nobody has to be asked.

The lesson. Ask what your product knows about each customer that they would be proud to show. Miles run, books finished, money saved, plants kept alive. Then give it to them in a format sized for a phone screen, on a date they can expect. A small app can do this with one screen and one share button.

A waitlist and a launch: Monzo

The move. Monzo is a British bank whose account lives in an app. On its own blog, the company says it added a waiting list in March 2016 because much of the work was manual. Staff posted cards themselves and could not keep up with demand. Existing customers received golden tickets, a link they could send to a friend that let the friend skip the list. Monzo removed the waiting list in May 2018, once new customers could get a card the next day.

The mechanism. The scarcity was real. Monzo's blog says that at the peak the team sent more than 5,000 cards in one day from the office. A queue caused by a real limit reads very differently from a queue invented by a marketing team. The golden ticket then made every customer the door. Being able to let a friend in is a small piece of status, and people use it.

The lesson. If you have a waitlist, say why it exists, and make sure the reason is true. Give the people already inside something to hand out. And take the queue away when the limit is gone, as Monzo did.

See how we work with consumer companies →

Retention through content: Fender Play

The move. In 2017 the guitar maker Fender launched Fender Play, a set of online video lessons. Reuters reported the reasoning from its chief executive, Andy Mooney. He said 45% of Fender's guitars sell to first-time players, and that 90% of those players abandon the instrument within a year. The ones who stay go on to own seven guitars on average. Fender Play cost $19.99 a month after a free introduction. CNBC reported that lessons ran about eight minutes and aimed to get beginners playing songs quickly.

The mechanism. Fender found the week where customers quit and made content for that week. A beginner who can play one song keeps the guitar. A beginner who keeps the guitar buys another. The lessons are sold on their own, and they also protect every later sale.

The lesson. Find the point where your new customers give up. The first wash, the second week, the first failed recipe. Make short content that gets them past it, and send it at that moment. This is the least glamorous route here, and often the one with the best return.

What these consumer marketing examples share

Seven routes, and the same few things keep showing up.

• Each company gave people something to do, beyond something to watch. Order the drink, join the club, share the card, hand a friend a ticket.
• Attention ended somewhere the company owns: an app, an account with followers, a customer list.
• The format could repeat. Ryanair's rules, Spotify's yearly Wrapped, Strava's yearly report.
• The first version was small. A founder with a phone, a queue caused by manual work, a year in review for 5 million users.
• The numbers that were published were mostly the company's own, so treat each as a claim with a source and a motive.

The second point is the one I would underline. Borrowed attention is cheap to win and expensive to keep winning. Every example here that lasted found a way to turn a moment into something the company could reach again without paying.

Read how startups get distribution without an ad budget →

B2c content marketing examples by kind of company

The routes do not suit every company equally. This is a starting guide from my own reading of the examples. It is an opinion, and your product may be the exception.

Pick one. A small team that tries all seven routes at once ends up with seven half-built things and no way to tell which one worked.

One number of our own, kept separate

Everything above is other companies' work. This section is ours, and it is the only one. On one direct to consumer brand in the Underboss portfolio, the second-purchase rate rose 50% and the third-purchase rate rose 40%. The client is anonymous under NDA. The receipt records those two results and nothing about the starting point, so I will not add one.

It belongs next to the Fender example. What happens after the first order decides how much a company can afford to pay for a customer.

Read how to reduce customer acquisition cost →

How to choose your first route

1. Write down where your customers come from today. Count customers, and ignore views for now.
2. Find the point where new customers drop off. If most never return, start with retention content.
3. If they stay but nobody new hears about you, choose one route for reach: owned short-form video or a founder on camera.
4. Write the rules of the format in four lines. Publish on a schedule your team can hold for three months.
5. Send every viewer somewhere you own: your accounts, your list, your app.
6. Only then look at creators, and start with the ones who already buy from you.

Underboss works on the first of those routes and the parts that connect to it. We build short-form video formats on a consumer company's own Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts, put paid budget only behind pieces that already worked for free, and train the client's team to run it.

If you want to know which route fits your company, ask for the free teardown. Send a link to the product and its channels. Within three days you get a written read on what brings customers in today and what we would build first. No call, and the plan is yours whether or not we work together.

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