⚫️ OpenAI: Marketing Case Study - The brand that makes tech feel human
ChatGPT went viral with no brand strategy. Now OpenAI rebrands, advertises and shows us what marketing in the age of AI can look like. Plus: 5 top learnings for our own marketing.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
We’re chatting about everything with AI now:
Love, dating, job interviews, business, recipes, coaching.
My students write exams with it.
My inbox is full of AI cold calls.
LinkedIn? A river of AI-written posts.
And at the top of this trend is ChatGPT the product of OpenAI whose name has become synonymous with all AI assistants (like Google that now stands for searching something).
OpenAI interestingly doesn’t shout “AI” like everyone else. While most tech sites plaster buzzwords, OpenAI’s presence feels strangely… human. Real people. Real settings. Real voices. The product is sci-fi but the presentation is everyday.
That contrast is on purpose.
We’ll dive into what they get right, what’s replicable, and why they feel different - from naming, ads and product launches, to social. We will dive deep on OpenAI’s marketing strategy.
And the main question:
What makes them special and different to most AI companies marketing approach and what can we learn from it?
Let’s take a look at that here today:
1️⃣ From Research Lab to Product Hero
⚫️ The $14 Million Dot
3️⃣ Human First Branding
4️⃣ The future of AI (marketing)
5️⃣ 5 Learnings for our own Marketing Strategy
1️⃣ From Research Lab to Product Hero
Let’s take a look into the past:
OpenAI started in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, talking about AGI (artificial general intelligence) safety more than consumer products. That changed overnight with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
A “launch” that had nothing to do with marketing, as this tweet from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shows:
It was meant as a “research preview” but quickly went viral, hitting 100 million users in two months and suddenly turning a lab into a household name.
And when we are speaking about the name: That almost wasn’t ChatGPT.
Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley admitted the team was about to ship it as “Chat with GPT-3.5” - until a last-minute, late-night decision simplified it. They settled on ChatGPT, short for “generative pre-trained transformer.” CEO Sam Altman later joked that even ChatGPT is a “horrible” name, but it stuck and became shorthand for AI itself.
The company’s value has exploded from around $29 billion in 2023, to $157 billion in late 2024, to around $340 billion in early 2025.
“The chatbot has evolved from a prototype to a $4 billion revenue engine with 300 million weekly active users. It has shaken the foundations of the tech industry, even as OpenAI loses money (and cofounders) hand over fist while competitors like Anthropic threaten its lead.”
Kylie Robison, The Verge
But at the beginning, there was just a product, no brand, no marketing, not even a corporate design guide. But that all changed in 2025:
They invested in a Super Bowl ad, did a polished rebrand, and now have a surprisingly human Instagram account. All signals that OpenAI is ready to step onto the stage as a brand in its own right.
⚫️ The $14 Million Dot
It’s February 2025, Super Bowl Sunday.
