Why Legacy Brands Like United, Dove, and Philadelphia Are Marketing on Reddit

United Airlines. Dove. Fidelity. Philadelphia Cream Cheese. These are not scrappy DTC startups looking for a cheap awareness play. They're legacy brands with nine-figure media budgets, and they're doing some of their most interesting marketing these days on… wait for it…wait for it… Reddit.

And what they’re doing (and why) is worth a deeper look.

We’ve all been using Reddit as an awesome community forum for years. But it’s kinda been the marketing world's weird uncle for years. Yes, brands knew it existed. But, for a long time, it didn’t make a ton of sense to build a full-fledged Reddit marketing strategy.

Until now.

A few things have happened recently in quick succession that have changed the calculus. This includes Reddit signing licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, Google pulling Reddit content directly into AI Overviews (and placing it at the top of the blue links list), and growth numbers exceeding 121 million daily active users across 100,000+ communities, according to Reddit.

Reddit is becoming one of the most important places for brands to understand, visibility, influence, and participate in customer conversations to build trust.

Let’s take a deeper look at what has changed, why Reddit is worth your time, and check out examples of brands we can emulate that are getting it right.

Why Reddit’s distribution power is So Strong Right now 

Reddit's distribution is bonkers - in a good way.

I may have stated that Reddit has been the weird uncle of the marketing world, but that’s only because we didn’t fully understand its power or true influence.

But, there’s one exceptional marketer, Ross Simmonds, founder of Foundation Marketing, who has understood the true value of Reddit as a marketing staple long before AI search entered the conversation.

"Brands need to stop thinking of Reddit as a social channel and start thinking of it as infrastructure," he told me.

In other words, Reddit is no longer a place to publish content. More and more, it’s one of the systems that shape what people see when they search, what AI models cite, and how buyers form opinions about companies and products.

One of the best examples is how Reddit influences search. His team at Foundation Marketing analyzed 8,566 keywords across multiple SaaS categories and found that Reddit cited or outranked every vendor on 4,225 of them, covering 957,540 monthly searches. The finding that caught his attention most: at keywords priced at $50+ CPC, Reddit wins 67.3% of the time in organic.

"You're bidding on keywords where a free Reddit thread is sitting above your homepage," he said.

The same dynamic shows up in AI-generated answers. When ChatGPT or Perplexity decides which sources to cite for "best CRM" or "how to choose a payroll provider," they pull from the places Google trusts, and Reddit sits at the top of that list.

Reddit Strategist and Founder @ Fan Out, Krista Doyle, explained further in her newsletter r/TheWarmups.

“AI models don't just index your website. They learn from the entire internet's opinion of you. And a massive chunk of that opinion is being shaped right now, by people who aren't you, in subreddits you may not even know exist,” Doyle said.

Simmonds explains the implications of brands ignoring Reddit in 2026. "The cost of ignoring Reddit used to be lost traffic. Today it's lost narrative control inside the systems your buyers use to make decisions,” he said.

Reddit threads are no longer a place for niche online communities to chat. They're now part of the answer layer that shapes what your buyers see, trust, and act on.

And most marketing teams aren’t yet participating in a way that makes sense (i.e., pay $50+ CPC for visibility when they could get it for free).

But, Is Reddit only a visibility play

The search and AI angle seems to get all the attention right now, and fair enough. It's a compelling business case. But brands that show up on Reddit only to improve their search footprint are leaving most of the value on the table.

Reddit is also one of the best social listening tools available. Unlike a brand survey or focus group, nobody on Reddit is performing for you.

The conversations are anonymous, unfiltered, and specific in a way that polished social channels rarely are. People talk about what they truly think about your product, your competitors, your category, and the gap between what brands promise and what they deliver.

Ross Simmonds believes “product feedback” is one of the most overlooked opportunities on the platform.

“The highest-leverage use of Reddit for most companies is treating it as a free product council that runs 24/7,” he said.

The reason it gets overlooked, he explained, is structural: "It doesn't roll up cleanly into a campaign report. No UTM. No attribution. No '30 MQLs from the Reddit feedback loop.' But the brands using Reddit this way are shipping product changes that make every other channel work better."

That makes Reddit incredibly useful for audience insight. And it's not giving you generic insight like "your core demographic is 18-to-34-year-old women who value authenticity." It gives you real insight into which features power users love, why customers abandon a product, and what language people use when they describe the problems they're trying to solve.

Take Glossier's Balm Dotcom reformulation. Customers spent months discussing why they disliked the new vegan formula, debating ingredient changes, documenting performance issues, and comparing experiences. One user summarized the reaction: "People think it doesn't work as well and are disappointed to see the product still separates." When Glossier eventually brought back the original formula, the subreddit erupted with comments like "we did it people" and "I've never felt this invigorated and heard."

That's like a live focus group explaining what's broken, why it matters, and how customers want the brand to respond.

For brands willing to go deeper, Reddit also opens up community management in a format most platforms don't allow.

Reddit's structure rewards consistency and usefulness over follower counts and posting frequency. A brand that shows up regularly in the right subreddits (answering questions, adding context, and being genuinely helpful) builds a different kind of equity than anything a campaign can buy.

Then there's authentic UGC content. Reddit users generate some of the most honest, specific, and creative material on the internet. The recent Dove campaign, which plastered real Reddit reviews across New York City billboards, is one example.

More broadly, Reddit surfaces the language, tensions, humor, and obsessions that make campaigns feel culturally true instead of brand-manufactured. That insight can inform everything from creative strategy to creator partnerships.

Reddit is also a powerful distribution channel. The platform's voting system allows useful content to rise without requiring paid amplification. Brands that understand subreddit culture can put the right content in front of highly engaged communities—people who came to Reddit specifically to learn, compare, and discuss a topic in depth.

Reddit's value isn't always something you can point to in a dashboard. But it often shows up everywhere else.

Brands that are getting Reddit Marketing Right

United Airlines: listening to customers and trying to make a meaningful difference

United is upfront about being early in its Reddit strategy. In a recent interview with Lia Haberman's ICYMI newsletter, United's Emily Snyder, Sr. Manager of Social Media, described the approach: "We are easing in with the goal of testing what works and studying how other brands are winning."

But even in listening mode, the team has had wins that would be nearly impossible to manufacture elsewhere.

One example: Snyder's team came across a Reddit post from a father whose son had lost his Pokémon card binder during travel. Instead of leaving a sympathetic comment and moving on, they shared the story internally. Employees around the world responded, ultimately donating more than 17,000 Pokémon cards to replace what the boy had lost.

"What started as a single social post turned into a global employee-driven effort to create a moment Reid and his family will never forget," Snyder told Haberman. When United shared it on social media, the comments were overwhelmingly positive.

The takeaway lies in her advice for brands thinking about getting started. "The pressure to be ultra-active as a brand on Reddit is low. Just start and see what opportunities you find,” she told Haberman.

Dove: turning authentic Reddit conversations into compelling creative

Many brands use Reddit to monitor sentiment. Dove turned that sentiment into the campaign itself.

For its 2026 "Dove r/eal reviews" campaign, the brand built creative around 50 real Reddit reviews of its Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Mask from users who agreed to participate. The reviews appeared exactly as customers wrote them, including both praise and criticism.

"Real beauty means real experiences, and that includes hearing what people actually think," Emily Barfoot, Head of Dove North America Hair & Skincare, said in the campaign announcement. The willingness to showcase both praise and criticism from real Redditors made the campaign more authentic and credible.

It makes perfect sense to lean into customer reviews on Reddit. Customers are searching Reddit for feedback and reviews anyway. It says a lot about a brand who is willing to embrace and even highlight unfiltered opinions—instead of informing them or pretending the average consumer can’t find them.

Authenticity isn't something brands can manufacture. But they can lean into it.

Philadelphia Cream Cheese: piggybacking on organic creator content

For the next example, let's go back to Haberman's newsletter, specifically her conversation with Reddit.

Reddit told Haberman about a sous chef who posted on Reddit.

Image source: ICYMI

The chef wanted the community to critique his chive-chopping skills. He promised to post every day until Reddit declared his technique good enough.

Philadelphia Cream Cheese made an incredibly smart play. They found the thread, amplified it, and turned it into a campaign.

They also sent him some knives, which he posted on Reddit, and the whole thing started again.

"It was just fun to see a brand participating in something very Reddit-y and kind of quirky on the platform," a Reddit spokesperson told Haberman.

The playbook here is simple: Pay attention to what's already happening on Reddit, show up in the conversation, and don’t manufacture authenticity when it’s staring you in the face.

A word of caution before proceeding

Every time a new marketing strategy starts working, marketers rush to optimize it. In a recent issue of r/TheWarmups, Krista Doyle warned that Reddit may be heading down the same path.

"I've noticed something about the way we talk about Reddit marketing right now. We 'leverage' it. We 'optimize for' it. We treat one of the most human spaces on the internet like a lever to pull and a box to check," she wrote.

But the people winning visibility on Reddit, Doyle argues, aren't focused on optimization. They're investing in their presence. They're showing up in the communities that matter to them, contributing value, and building credibility over time.

Doyle applies the SEO concept of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to Reddit participation. On a website, a brand can claim expertise. On Reddit, she argues that expertise has to be demonstrated publicly, one interaction at a time.

The brands succeeding on the platform show up consistently, contribute something useful, and become part of the community before asking for attention in return.

Participating on Reddit is a huge opportunity for brands to get visibility, understand customers, and build trust. The key is to show up like United Airlines, Dove, and Philadelphia —authentically and without optimizing humanity out of the process.