The best marketing in robotics sells a worldview, not a robot.
When I was in China, it became clear to me that robotics is where AI was 5 years ago. But while AI stayed an abstract idea until it happened, robots have been on our minds since ~1920, when the word "robot" first appeared. Many people grew up reading Asimov and contemplating how we'd interact with robots. They come in all kinds of formats, but the ones that fascinate people the most are humanoids.
With the resemblance come the concerns — how safe and useful are they? That's what the right storytelling solves.
As we build content for the most ambitious tech companies at Matter Co, I went deep on how the biggest players market themselves — humanoids edition.
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@1x_tech — marketing as lifestyle
NEO looks less like a robot and more like a knit sweater that happens to have a face.
1X hired Eli Russell Linnetz — the fashion photographer behind SKIMS and GAP — to shoot a humanoid as an editorial. Soft fabric cover, domestic and calm. Everything is designed to make the robot feel like it belongs in your living room.
Their first-year batch, over 10,000 units, was sold out in five days at $20K each.
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@BostonDynamics — marketing as the demo
For many years, Boston Dynamics ran the best organic content strategy in hardware. Atlas doing backflips. Robots dancing to "Do You Love Me" — tens of millions of views on YouTube.
They turned a robotics lab into at some point the most recognizable brand in the category. The fame paid off: the robots are now deployed by over 1,000 customers and at Hyundai's factories.
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@UnitreeRobotics — marketing as national power
The company has been sharing new stunts one after another over the last few years. In one, the CEO is testing an army of robots; in another, robots become figure skaters. Then 679 million people watched the robots do kung fu at China's Spring Festival Gala. Unitree focuses not on being understood but on being powerful enough to trust.
A G1 starts around $13,500, much less than most Western humanoids at the moment. Unitree can price like that because the local supply chains let them assemble a new prototype fast and cheaply. In 2025, over 5,500 humanoids were shipped to customers.
A humanoid robot can raise some concerns: uncanny valley, job anxiety, decades of sci-fi telling us this could end badly. Most products start from zero; for many people, a robot starts from negative. So the first job of robotics marketing isn't to create desire — it's to replace that fear with something else.
1X replaces it with comfort. Boston Dynamics replaces it with delight. Unitree replaces it with power and access.
In part 2, I'll write about how other robotics companies approach content and what comes next.