How Brands Use Emojis in Marketing: Campaigns, Risks, and Results
In 2015, Chevrolet issued a press release written entirely in emojis. 🚗💨🌟 — you get the idea. It was a marketing stunt to announce the Chevy Cruze, designed to appeal to millennials and generate media coverage. It worked: the press release went viral, generating coverage in outlets that had no intention of writing about a midsize sedan.
This moment crystallized something that marketing teams were already figuring out: emojis are not just decoration. They are attention mechanisms, cultural signals, and emotional shorthand — all of which are valuable in marketing.
Why Emojis Work in Marketing
The appeal of emojis for brands comes down to a few measurable and psychological factors.
Attention in crowded feeds. 📧 Email subject lines with emojis consistently show higher open rates — studies from Experian and Campaign Monitor have reported lifts ranging from 5% to 56% depending on industry, audience, and emoji choice. A subject line of "Your order has shipped 🚀" stands out from a wall of text in a way that "Your order has shipped" does not.
Emotional resonance. Emojis activate the same brain regions as human faces. The ❤️ in a brand message creates a different emotional register than a paragraph explaining "we care about our customers." Emotion drives purchase decisions, and emojis trigger emotion efficiently.
Character economy. On Twitter/X, SMS, and push notifications, character limits are real constraints. 🔥 conveys excitement and urgency in one character. "Hot deal that won't last!" takes many more.
Younger audience signaling. For brands trying to reach Gen Z and younger Millennials, emoji fluency signals cultural literacy. A brand that uses 💀 correctly — to mean "I'm dead from how good this is" — demonstrates it understands internet culture in a way that resonates with native digital users.
Notable Emoji Marketing Campaigns
Domino's Pizza: The 🍕 Order
In 2015, Domino's launched a campaign that let customers order pizza by tweeting a single 🍕 emoji at the company. It was technically a connected loyalty account system, but the emoji as the trigger was the campaign's entire hook.
The campaign generated enormous press coverage and established Domino's as a digitally innovative brand at a time when competitors were still figuring out apps. It worked because it was genuinely functional — the emoji triggered a real order — not just decorative.
World Wildlife Fund: #EndangeredEmoji
The WWF ran a campaign asking users to tweet endangered animal emojis — 🐘 🦏 🐼 🦁 — with the charity receiving a small donation each time one was tweeted. The campaign generated 559,000 Twitter mentions in the first 24 hours.
It succeeded by meeting people in their existing behavior (tweeting animals) and adding meaning to it. Users felt their natural emoji use was doing something good.
Bud Light: The 🍺 Hashtag Emoji
For the 2016 Super Bowl, Bud Light worked with Twitter to create a custom hashtag emoji — a branded beer mug that appeared automatically when users tweeted specific hashtags. Twitter's custom hashtag emoji program, which has since expanded significantly, lets brands associate their own icon with specific trending moments.
These branded hashtag emojis cost significant media spend but guarantee brand visibility every time a hashtag appears in conversation.
Ikea's Emoji Furniture Campaign
Ikea created an illustrated emoji keyboard featuring products from its catalog — a 🪑 chair that was distinctly Ikea, a lamp that looked like a Fado. The campaign was a clever way to embed product imagery into everyday communication and was widely shared as a novelty.
Risks and Failures
Emoji marketing isn't without hazard. Several categories of misstep recur regularly.
The Tone-Deaf Emoji
Using an emoji in a context where it signals insensitivity is a fast route to backlash. A brand tweeting 💀 on a day when news involves actual deaths, or using 😂 in response to a genuine customer complaint, generates the kind of social media attention no marketing team wants.
The 🍑 peach and 🍆 eggplant emojis are well understood as sexual innuendo in many contexts. Brands that have used them without awareness of these secondary meanings have found themselves explaining unintended double entendres.
Forcing It
Brands that use emojis in every communication, or deploy them in contexts where they feel awkward, come across as trying too hard. A law firm's client newsletter doesn't need 🎉 after every paragraph. Emoji frequency should match the brand voice and audience expectation — mismatches read as performative rather than natural.
Emoji Rendering Differences
A 🤞 crossed fingers might be meaningful on iOS but render differently on the recipient's Android device. Marketing emails sent to mixed-device audiences may display emoji inconsistently, sometimes as blank boxes (tofu) on older systems. Campaigns that rely on a specific emoji's visual impact need to account for platform variation.
Cultural Misfires
Emojis carry different meanings across cultures. The 👍 thumbs-up is positive in most Western contexts but has negative connotations in parts of the Middle East. The 🤙 shaka is Hawaiian surfer culture; using it in contexts targeting other demographics can feel arbitrary or affected.
Best Practices for Emoji Marketing
Marketing practitioners who do this well share some common principles:
Match the channel. Emojis work on Twitter/X, Instagram, push notifications, and SMS. They are less appropriate in formal B2B communications, legal documents, or press releases to non-consumer audiences (the Chevrolet stunt worked precisely because it was subversive of that norm).
Less is more. One or two well-placed emojis outperform emoji-stuffed copy. 📦 Free shipping on orders over $50 is cleaner than 📦✨🎁💌 Free shipping on orders over $50 ✅🌟🛍️.
Test across platforms. Before launching a campaign centered on a specific emoji, verify how it renders on iOS, Android, and major web platforms. EmojiFYI's comparison tool is useful exactly here.
Know your secondary meanings. Audit the emojis you plan to use for internet-culture connotations that might not be in your brand guidelines.
Be authentic to brand voice. Emojis should feel like a natural extension of how the brand already communicates, not a costume put on to seem younger or cooler.
The Future of Emoji Marketing
As emoji sets grow — Unicode 16.0 in 2024 added new characters — brands have more tools available. Custom emoji on platforms like Slack, Discord, and social media apps allow brands to create entirely owned visual vocabulary for their communities.
Branded sticker packs, animated emoji in messaging apps, and AR emoji filters represent the next wave. The fundamental dynamic remains the same: brands want to meet customers in the emotional, visual language they already use, and emoji is a major part of that language.
Explore More on EmojiFYI
Planning an emoji-driven campaign? Use our tools to check how your chosen emojis render across platforms and see usage data before you build your strategy around one.