Each week, we'll bring you select insights from our newsletter, How to Build Brands and Influence People (HBBIP). To have all of these insights delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe today!
As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, I’m not much of a car guy. Sure, they’re fast and can bring you places, but as a certified city boy, my parents have never owned a car, so it wasn’t really a part of my childhood. Or my adulthood, tbh: I got my license at the ripe old age of 29, mainly because waiting until I was 30 would have been absurd.
But you know what I do love? Great creator marketing programs. And much like grocery stores (we see you, Trader Joe’s!), automotive companies inspire incredible passion amongst digital creators. It’s a joy to dive into the subcultures and niche communities within the world of car creators—way more fun than driving.
That’s why I go back to the well (the trunk?) so many times. From Cadillac to Formula 1 to Volkswagen to Yamaha, the number of times I’ve written about automotive companies in this newsletter is approaching the number of times I’ve driven a car in my lifetime.
It’s six, for the record. The last time was my road test, which I passed. So just remember the next time you’re driving on the highway that in the eyes of the law, I’m allowed to be out there too.
Today we’ve got another automotive brand on deck, drawing ever closer to evening the score between HBBIP mentions and times behind the wheel. This brand does a little of everything, and so does its creator community. It also led me to discover one of the funner facts I’ve had the pleasure of sharing in this newsletter, so there’s that, too.
Without further ado, strap on your seatbelt, rev your engine, do something else car-related, and let’s head down this road once again. This time, we’ll be riding…
At the beginning of the year, when I looked at vertical-based leaderboards of fastest-growing brands, Suzuki stood out from the pack—not just in automotive, but across the creator economy at large. That’s why I’m excited to finally cover them today.
Little did I know that there’s a lot more to Suzuki than meets the eye.
Founded in 1909, making it possibly the oldest brand ever profiled in HBBIP, Suzuki sprang up in the industrial seaside town of Hamamatsu, where it’s still headquartered today. Here’s the fun fact: much like Samsung, which began its life as a textile company, Suzuki originally pumped out a very different sort of product—weaving machines, to be precise.
That’s right: Suzuki spent their first thirty years building looms. It’s a chapter of their history that even today continues to…loom large.
During the Great Depression, Michio Suzuki figured that diversification might be a good thing, or maybe he just saw a car going really fast and thought it looked like fun. At any rate, the Suzuki we know and love was born. That must have been a rough day at the loom factory.
Thanks to its forward-thinking founder, Suzuki currently manufactures cars, motorcycles, engines, wheelchairs, and more, though I can’t find any information about their current loom program.
Let’s take a look at what steady, large-scale, four-wheel-drive global momentum looks like.
Suzuki Creator Count, 2020 - 2025
Fueling Suzuki’s growth is a rapidly expanding creator base. Suzuki grew from 2.1k creators in 2020 to 14.7k in 2025, a 7x expansion.
Suzuki Post Count, 2020 - 2025
Notably, post count growth (11.5x) outpaced creator count growth, with Suzuki’s content volume swelling from 8.6k to 98.8k posts. With creators producing far more content per capita, Suzuki is building yet another engine, this time for winning over share of voice metrics on social.
Suzuki EMV, 2020 - 2025
Meanwhile, over in the land of Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that reflects volume of viral conversation, Suzuki grew from $31.1M EMV in 2020 to $397M in 2025, a 12.8x increase that reflects sustained creator activity and a massively upscaled digital footprint.
Suzuki Impressions, 2020 - 2025
But as you can see from the chart, impressions is where things get really crazy. Despite fluctuations throughout the time period monitored, Suzuki’s impressions climbed from 272.5M in 2020 to 4.7B in 2025, a 17x increase.
Suzuki Engagements, 2020 - 2025
With engagements, we see a bit more of a mixed bag. Engagements have risen from 16.9M to 134.6M, nearly an 8x increase despite a fairly sharp drop between 2022 and 2023. While the broader trajectory is clearly upward, we’re seeing the repetition of a trend we’ve seen elsewhere: sharper impressions numbers, while engagements lag a bit behind.
Still, it’s clear that Suzuki is attracting more attention than ever. But where is this attention coming from?
Suzuki Share of Impressions by Platform, 2025
Unlike many brands that are overwhelmingly TikTok-first, Suzuki’s channel mix is more diversified. In 2025:
Suzuki Share of Engagements by Platform, 2025
Engagements follow a similar multi-platform pattern, with Instagram driving the largest share, followed by YouTube. TikTok takes up a notably larger share of the pie, eating into YouTube’s lead. All of this fairly mixed data suggests that, much like Suzuki’s inventory, the brand’s growth is less dependent on a single breakout platform, and more so built on broad cross-channel visibility.
Suzuki's creator community doesn’t exactly look like a car show. Data from 2025 reveals a creator ecosystem that’s sprawling, eclectic, and somewhat counterintuitive. Fitting for a truly global brand, Suzuki’s highest-value creator relationships span Japanese professional wrestling, North American baseball, Brazilian product reviewers, Pakistani auto enthusiasts, and luxury watch content.
No loom content, though. At least not that I can find.
When it comes to raw EMV dominance, STARDOM Official—the flagship account for Japan's premier women's professional wrestling promotion—is in a category of its own. With $9.5M EMV across 1.1k posts, it generated more than double the value of Suzuki's next closest creator.
STARDOM’s sustained, high-frequency output reflects a deep, long-running alignment between Suzuki and Japanese sports entertainment culture. I bet you didn’t have weaving machines and Japanese female pro wrestling on your bingo card for today’s newsletter, but clearly you have much to learn about Suzuki.
As you'd expect, Suzuki's creator ecosystem has a strong motorsports component. Still, there’s a wide range of formats and channels within that world:
One of the standout growth stories here is Supercross Live, which went from $53k to $1.6M EMV in a single year, reflecting Suzuki's deep investment in American supercross through its factory racing program.
As we’ve seen with countless successful brands, if you want to be a leading global enterprise, it’s not enough to win in your own category. Instead, you also have to drive value outside the world of automotives.
As you might be aware, baseball is pretty big in Japan. But as evidenced by Suzuki’s creator set, Japan is also pretty big in baseball: official MLB accounts ($6.8M EMV, +292%) is the year's biggest breakout, with the MLB’s broader ecosystem, including owned social for the MLB Network, the MLB on Fox, ESPN, and the Baseball Hall of Fame all spiking in tandem.
Then there are the entertainment and pop culture creators rounding out the picture: everything from Japanese YouTube music channels to APAC MMA organizations to Italian Serie A clubs. Taken together, this crossover presence suggests that Suzuki is showing up in entertainment and culture feeds well beyond the traditional automotive context.
Whether through formal sponsorship or organic association, Suzuki has built a creator footprint that reflects the full breadth of its global audience. Next stop: getting back to its roots. The people (me) demand more weaving content!
*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.
To get all of these stories, plus much more, delivered to your inbox weekly, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.