Roots before Reach: YETI's Playbook To Building an Iconic Brand

0:00We focus a lot around what we call this sort of breath and depth strategy. and breadth is what I think about brands that go that really go wide and continue to grow and if you think of that strategy like a tree and I've talked about this before on other things but um if you think about your tree and your tree growing you know ultimately the only way to get your tree growing is to is to strengthen the roots and um and for us strengthening the roots it's in it's absolutely necessary if you want your tree to grow and so we put priority on that and so our team that um yeah so our team that that make sure those roots are strong and all the places that we're connecting you know with consumers is is vital to to yeti and and our business

0:50i'm eric fullweiler and this is scratch bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today everyone we have a very special episode for you today. Not only is it Bill Neff, who is the head of marketing at Yeti, one of the goat challenger brands for sure, but also we recorded this interview live at the ANA, that's the Association of National Advertisers, one of the largest marketing organizations over in the US at their global day of learning live stream in front of about a thousand people. So it's a bit shorter than the other conversations because we only had a half an hour, but it is a really good one.

1:35So obviously, I'm sure everybody listening has heard of Yeti. And we start the conversation talking about kind of the evolution of the brand and really connect on. Many of you have heard me talk about how we see challenger brands take this kind of operating system type of approach to their positioning. It is built to update and upgrade as the product does, as the audience needs to, as the culture does, the category changes. and Bill talks about how he has taken that approach at Yeti. He also talks about his experience at Under Armour, which of course in the time that he was there became an incredibly successful brand and this idea of this really singular clear rallying cry that the team had there of how to get in the locker room, how to get into the places where their customers were talking to each other, into the communities and the cultures that really mattered to them.

2:27And then we talk about how he's applied that at Yeti. of course. And one of the things that is really interesting to me that I've referenced and I'm going to be referencing many times is the organizational structure of how Bill has set up his team is very different than most marketing departments and really reflects this community and culture first approach that they have. I'm not going to give it away. You're going to have to listen. Last part of the conversation, which of course is going to be relevant to everybody, is he doesn't share specific numbers, but he does say that the media budget for Yeti is much smaller than you think it would be.

2:58So how does he and his team go about creating a mainstream brand with the impact and exposure that it has with a much smaller budget than you might expect? So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Bill Neff of Yeti. Hey everyone, and just want to say a quick thank you to Jerusha and the whole team at the ANA for putting this on. This is no small feat. Bill, really looking forward to this conversation. How are you doing today? I'm well. Thank you for asking. Great. So obviously this came up because you were going to come onto our CMO podcast. And when the opportunity came up to do a session with the ANA for the Global Day of Learning, we said, well, why not just have the conversation live in front of a thousand people?

3:47So we're going to use the brief that we prepared for our conversation, which is going to go through three chapters. First, touching a bit about you and your background. You've been behind some pretty epic brands in the past. And I think this actually builds nicely on what the last speaker was saying kind of towards the end. Like your background, becoming a CMO, becoming a head of marketing, having kind of a strong commercial component to what you've done. We're going to talk about how you tell stories at scale. And we're going to talk about how you do and market to mass market audiences without having to do mass market media.

4:23But before we get into that, so our mission at Rival is to understand and document the playbook of Challenger Brands around the world. And over the last four years, we've spent, our team has spent about 10 ,000 hours doing just that. However, there's always more to learn and there are always more brands, Challenger Brands, to learn about. So the icebreaker question that I ask every guest on the 100 plus episodes of this podcast that I've done so far is, bill can you please tell us about a challenger brand that you are particularly passionate about right now and why yeah um there's a few of them out there for sure and when i think about um who keeps gravitating to the top and part of it is i know the team over there and it's really fun to watch them but turtle box for me which is a audio company out of houston texas that decided to have the audacity to jump into a space crowded with massive brands like beats by dre and and thony and jbl and all these companies that just kind of have sort of circled the market um they decided to be disruptive and for me watching them from this little houston brand that had an idea and the founders were kind of doing a part-time to what they're now and how they're really gaining traction it's really really fun fun to watch amazing i'm not heard of them but that's not saying all that much i will definitely check them out and actually we're working now on um and i think you're going to be on it we're working on a what will be an annual list of the top 50 challenger brands that we come across kind of in all of our exploration so maybe we'll see if we can get a submission for them um all right so let's get into those three chapters bill but But actually, before we do, I think probably everybody listening here today has heard of Yeti.

6:18But I do like to start these interviews by just getting from the CMO, because I also think it's sometimes interesting to kind of see how the CMO describes the brand and how people perceive it on the outside. Can you please give us an overview of Yeti, who it is, what it does for people who don't know, or just as the way that you would describe it? Yeah. So it's funny. so if you would have asked me this 12 years ago i would have said um we're a hunt fish brand that makes coolers and we've just started to make drinkware and if you asked me 18 months ago i would have said we're an outdoor gear company that builds equipment for you know coolers drinkware cargo bags um and now we're continuing to evolve and i would just say we make equipment that lasts forever and um you know yeti continues to sort of just kind of spread its wings a little bit and kind of follow you know where the communities that are interested in in our product and um and and then we go support them and we'll get into talking about kind of how we do that but for us we we make gear and we make equipment that that truly lasts forever it's interesting you know doing these interviews and doing all this research to speak to cmos and founders of challenger brands but also you know we do have a sprinkling of let's say incumbent cmos who are thinking and acting like challengers and it's really interesting to kind of see the contrast between those two and one of the things that i've seen and that we've seen in our research is that there's a very different approach to brand positioning brand strategy how these businesses would answer that question of who is the brand and what does it stand for.

8:06And I think one of the biggest differences is exactly what you just talked about, where a lot of what we see with challenger brands is that there's a certain kind of built-in flexibility or plasticity almost to the brand. It is evolving because the needs of the customer are evolving. The product itself or the product line might be evolving. The category is evolving. The culture within the category is evolving. So I know I'm going off script here, but if you'll bear with me, I'd love to double click on that for a second. Is it kind of an intent, like, is there a process that you go through where you're like, okay, it's been 90 days.

8:41We need to review what we stand for. Is it more organic? If so, how do you make sure that your team is aligned on how it's changing? Because I think that that's where we've seen Challenger Brands be successful is in that kind of constant, you know, but not, you know, not, there's always purpose to the evolution. Mm-hmm. How do you go about that? We listen intently to our audiences and the consumers that are adopting our products. So generally speaking, and I'll just bring up, you know, when we talk about outdoor community, and that's something that probably a lot of people listening, if you've heard of Yeti, you would have thought of us.

9:18And we are, and we are in the outdoor space, and we do a lot in that space. But, you know, we have a whole cast iron line, and the cast iron line has kind of come through. We've been, you know, we started in beer and barbecue and these pit masters started to take us into like broader culinary and using our coolers and really drinkware and some of our equipment in those spaces. And so, you know, 18 months ago or so, we started, you know, we have a cast iron line. That's a really amazing cast iron line. And so when you think about cast iron, you think about who we're servicing in that space. It isn't your typical outdoor retailer that's selling super high end cast iron.

10:00And so for us, but that was all an evolution process of where can Yeti go and what can we, yeah, what can we continue to dream about who Yeti is? And there's tons of stuff that we're like, well, can we make this? And we're like, yeah, probably not. Probably not ready for that. But the things that do make sense continue to evolve the brand, continue to evolve the spaces that we're kind of allowed to play in. But generally speaking, it comes from outward in, in helping us dream about where we can go. and do you because i i think you know customer centricity right it's one of those terms that gets thrown around all the time but if you ask 10 people what it actually means or how you actually go about doing it you get 10 different answers but at the end of the day i really think that all gross comes from being able to understand and deliver on customer needs in a better faster newer more differentiated way so i'm always curious because again with challenger brands it just seems like they are closer to the customer.

11:03They are listening more. Sometimes there's kind of a system to that, and sometimes it's just kind of the culture that they have. How do you make sure, and I know we are going to talk a little bit about kind of how you structure your teams and your community approach later, but is there anything else that you could share about how you make sure that you and your marketing team and your organization overall is listening to be able to get those insights on how you need to evolve the brand? yeah well i mean it really it does come down to community and it goes to come down to the people that kind of shepherd those communities for us it's a very big team we focus a lot around what we call this sort of breath and depth strategy and breath is what i think about brands that go that really go wide and continue to grow and if you think of that strategy like a tree and i've talked about this before on other things but um if you think about your tree and your tree growing you know ultimately the only way to get your tree growing is to is to strengthen the roots and um and for us strengthening the roots it's in it's absolutely necessary if you want your tree to grow and so we put priority on that and so our team that um yeah so our team that that make sure those roots are strong and all the places that we're connecting you know with consumers is is vital to Yeti and our business.

12:26Marketing can feel lonely at the top unless you're in the right room. That's what Rivalamp is, a global community built for senior marketers and brand leaders. Inside our private WhatsApp group, you'll find unfiltered conversations, sharp insights, and bold ideas you won't see on LinkedIn. Straight from some of the brightest minds in marketing, it's exclusive, it's application only, and it's designed for challenger marketers who want to push boundaries together. Apply now at wearerival.com and join the marketers rewriting the rules. Love that. All right, so let's come back and talk for a minute about your background.

13:05You've been behind some pretty epic brands, Under Armour, Sitka, Justin Timberlake's tequila brand, and also you had sales. You had a sales background and are now in marketing. So what are some of the key elements and you know from your background that you've taken that have made you kind of successful and effective at Yeti and that kind of commercial mindset how important was that as an element of what you brought and what's worked with the role that you have now yeah I think for um for me I go back to probably the biggest example of growth was my time at Under armor so i was there from 2003 2009 and i was mid-20s kind of late 20s and um and watching that brand grow we didn't have media dollars we didn't have a lot of those things that that our competitors at the time were having but what we had was this ability to be super intimate with um with our at the time really football but we were expanding into other sports while i was there but it was really intimacy and we called it Kevin Plank would always call it locker room talk and we really believed that you know to get one locker room all right it's going to be a small little it's not going to go anywhere really but to get a thousand locker rooms like the intimacy which in each of those locker rooms because those locker rooms don't necessarily talk to each other but they're talking to themselves and they're having the same conversations and that conversation starts to elevate into a place where just building energy for the brand.

14:44And so one of the, in my career, when I think back of like hyper growth and we were in hyper growth at that time at Under Armor, it was all about being intimate with your, with your consumer base and the people that you're trying to serve and really understanding them. So I've, you know, and then when I brought that to my time at 901 tequila we just didn't have that like i i realized that that was a moment of five year kind of moment in my career that i was like okay all of the things that i thought you know i i just took the underarmor time for granted i was just a i was just a kid being told what to do and um and and when we didn't have that anymore then it was like wait a second like it's not working here as well.

15:31And then when I went to Sika Gear, we had that same mindset. And Jonathan Hart always, he was the founder there, always talked about, we were very intimate with our hunting communities that we serviced. And then, so Yeti, but Roy and Ryan at Yeti were building the same things. We have a CEO, Matt Reichest, that believes in that, you know, kind of mindset. And we build out our communities and when we do, and we look for intimacy within the places that we think energy is moving through those spaces. So when I look back on it, though, that time at Under Armour was, it was, I didn't know what I was watching.

16:08All I know is that when I went to Under Armour, nobody knew what it was. And when I left, people thought I was crazy for leaving. It must have done something right. All right, I want to come on to the community piece of it, but there's a question in this chapter that our producer wrote that I really love. So Yeti products are not cheap, and they shouldn't be. They are quality. They are premium. But I think a lot of CMOs listening or a lot of CMOs out there can struggle with, particularly early on before the brand is established, and can drive that premium purchasing power, how do you navigate the price versus perceived value conversation to be able to bring a more premium brand to market that people are willing to pay for because they see the value in it so i definitely saw this is a balance so i'm going to say some things that that you know our approach is a very balanced approach but i i truthfully believe that brands can't first party talk their way into that and And you can talk about whatever the product you're making and how great it is.

17:22But you're just talking about yourself. And I think humans in nature are kind of reluctant to believe someone if they just walk into a room and just start shouting out how great they are. So if there's features and benefits that make it interesting or unique, then sure. You need to tell that story on why. But I truly believe, and this is how Yeti did, it was the third party avocation, which really was what got people to trust. Because, you know, it wasn't us that they trusted because they didn't know who we were. It was the people that they trusted that we became intimate with. And then the tool became useful for them.

18:03And that is what ultimately was the kind of the domino that knocked over people's adoption of the brand. And so I really believe anytime that you're going to be making something for someone, if it doesn't have, you know, and then there's a group of people that do that thing and there's going to be people that that group looks up to within them doing those things. and if you can't convince that your product is worth it for them then i think you're gonna have a hard go at it but if you can have them convinced that this product is needed for whatever i whatever they do then they go ahead and tell your story for you and that's what happened and it happened at under armor it happened at sick of gear through guides and outfitters and at yeti it was the same thing it's just it's this balance of first party talk which you need and this but this third party avocation is ultimately what we really lean into.

18:54So for me, and so the price point never became a thing. I mean, we're not trying to sell$4 ,000 coolers, but there are people trying to sell $10 ,000 saunas out there. And for the people that are doing that, you got to, like, you have to have some level of trust through a trusted source and trying to establish that. And that's what, that's what we focus on here at Yeti. And I think the brands that focus on that are the ones that have success in moving their product. I'd love to, like, I think a lot of people listening would agree with that, would find that interesting, you know, something that they should be doing.

19:32But I would imagine a lot of people listening might not know exactly how to get started. what would you recommend to a cmo or head of marketing listening out there that kind of buys into this approach of word of mouth tapping into the community community generating advocacy building the brand through people not talking at people how do you kind of like what's the first step that you would recommend people take for that i mean um one i would say find out where you are and if you have you know if you don't if you have zero advocates i don't know how strong your brand is and maybe you're in the middle of a kind of a turnaround or something like that then it's going out and really trying to listen to why aren't people resonating or wanting to talk about your brand or why are you you know get to the get to the bottom of why something isn't resonating through that process.

20:30And, and then you can start to attack that problem and start to find solutions for what it is. But, you know, yeah, I know, um, you know, you brought up me being in sales and the power of relationships is what, um, I learned through that process. And I still believe that like getting super tight from a relationship perspective, I still believe so much of marketing is built behind really great relationships that allow things to start to happen. I think for a CMO that is like, yeah, I like it, one, it's to find out where you are and then start to dissect it. And then you have to believe in it because it takes longer.

21:13It's easier to put out a multi-million dollar pay campaign and talk about impressions and things like that. It's harder to be like, all right, we're going to go create a hundred new relationships with people that hope to get this sort of stimulation of word of mouth going and application on our brand. It's hard. It isn't easy. And you're only as good, you know, I had someone say like the value of a relationship is the time that you choose to spend with them. And so it's time. And that's a really valuable resource for everybody on this call, I would assume is time. And so how do you make that time?

21:49And how do you build teams that also understand that. So it means like Roy Cedars, he was like, don't ever let your email be the last, like, don't ever let them who are emailing you be the last email in the email chain. Always a thanks, always a whatever. There's always something on the, on the other end that can create the fact that you care about the people that you're ultimately trying to get to talk about your brand. So, but that would be my advice for any, for a CMO out there is to understand the situation you're in and not all brands are fueled on this you know and so for us and it's it's where i my strengths come in is that brands that are that want to fuel on the stimulation of word mouth i think that's where that's where i i you know that's just my experience and kind of what i've seen seen work so of that and i'll just call out and kind of underline two things you said that were going through my mind one it really goes back to the listening that you mentioned at the very beginning, like having a authentic, realistic, comprehensive understanding of how you of who you are and how you're perceived from other people, because that's the thing that matters most from your audience.

22:55But then the other thing in terms of relationships and time, I think that only becomes more true and more valuable in the world that we're going into. That's more tech and I agree. It's more AI native. The quality of anything really, I think rises to the top, but certainly of time. Yep. Okay. So, Bill, let's talk about how do you tell stories at scale? And I want to start with something that you said in our briefing call. You talked about how when brands start to scale product lines, you have to start telling people stories and not product stories. Can you expand on what you mean by that and how you're applying that at Yeti?

23:35Yeah. Yeah. And listen, this isn't anything that we do. It's nothing that we do. It isn't like we've mastered this. It's, it is, it is something that we continue to kind of focus on, make sure that, that, you know, we do the things that, that we think we should do. But when I think, so at one point when we were just a Tundra and we just had a cooler, you can only talk about that product so much. And so at that time we started to kind of work around. All right. Um, you know, what else can we tell? What other stories can we tell? That's one thing to force you into telling stories of the people using your product.

24:14And then it's like a, you're just driving the persona of who you are as a brand through these people you're telling stories of. And so we really loved that. And we started to develop that, but then we got to a point where we started to make a bunch of products and we were like, well, we got to tell people about all these products that we have now. And, um, and then we kind of get, you get, you get cornered into this, into this machine that's just constantly trying to educate people on product and the new product that's out. And what we're facing right now is that that's an impossible task, especially for a brand that has a growing product line.

24:48It's really hard to just keep introducing, uh, more and more products to people when, you know, I mean, Just think about your normal life and the brands, you know, you probably only know 20 % of the products they make or can even name even that many. And so for us, it goes kind of resets us and goes back to, OK, we've set up a really big third party application. We've got tons of ambassadors. We have tons of friends. We have a lot of partners out there. And so now it's about telling those stories that really resonate emotionally with the people that are seeing them. So we believe our brand comes to life and who Yeti is and how it stays top of mind through telling the stories of our people.

25:30And our people are really real. The relationships are real. They use all the products that we have and they believe in us as much as we believe in them. And so we go back to when we think about storytelling, it always has to have a real thing behind it. We don't hire actors. We don't hire, you know, we tell the stories of the people that are out there that are using our stuff. And so for us, hopefully that resonates to the people who are fans of them, that it goes back to the trust through trust to sources. And then you kind of start to connect a little more emotionally with people. And, you know, and we just think that's work.

26:14Because to market just product, product, product, product, product, product, I mean, the consumer will just get fatigued and kind of, they won't know what you stand for. And so for us, it's trying to reiterate kind of what Yeti stands for. And we do that best by not telling you what we stand for, but telling the stories of the people that stand for the things we stand for. And if people want to see a great live example of that philosophy and that strategy coming to life, go check out the Duckman campaign that Bill and the Yeti team did a little while back. What does the future of the CMO really look like?

26:56Does the role still belong in the C-suite or is it about to be replaced by AI? And if you're just a creative, should you be worried about your job? In the future of the CMO documentary presented by Rival, Eric talks with leaders from MasterCard, Shell, Dr. Schall's and more to unpack what tomorrow's marketing leaders need to know today. Together, they explore the future of the role, what will be expected and what you need to know to stay relevant as a marketing professional. So what does the future of the CMO actually look like? Watch the full documentary through the link in the show notes. And now back to the episode.

27:33I always think it's interesting to look at the organizational structure within companies and marketing departments as a reflection of their priorities. And Bill, the way that you've structured your team, I think is a great reflection and a really interesting anecdote, something I've referenced actually a few times since I heard you say it. Can you tell us about the team makeup and how you've kind of oriented the people underneath you to be able to reflect and bring to life that strategy? yeah i mean we we we look at it in two kind of fronts we look at in that breadth front of how we telling our first party advocation and we're looking at it from a a third party advocation kind of the the depth part of it and so we have two clear like roles that our groups do and the breadth side is the brand team and there's a handful of people on that team and it's some the creative team and some other things like that but the depth side so we take brand that's driving campaign developed for us our community team that's driving the relationships in marketing is four times the size of our brand team and so it is and it isn't one a person in brand and four it's like five people in brand and 20 people in community i think we have 23 people in community now um and so they are constantly driving intimacy with those spaces you know and and that continues to evolve.

28:56It started with four, started with one, but then it got to, when I got here in 15 and I was running their group, there was four people calling on communities. And now we're over 20 that are just at the events, at the visiting our ambassadors and making sure they have the right product, going out and listening to the communities, trying to find that intimacy, what's important to them, but that is their job. And they're on the road half the time at least. and they're just out in the space. And then our brand team here, which is a team we rely on heavily, drives kind of the calendar, drives the first party communication of what we want to talk about.

29:36And that's just a philosophy we believe in. But that goes back to the time thing. You can't have four people in community and serve as 15 communities or more that we do. You just can't do it. We don't have enough of that. and that's a big headcount. It's all those things that you got to think about, but we just really fundamentally believe in how important that is. And so we continue to invest there. And I love that because I think it's interesting how many internal marketing departments and also many agencies and consultancies for that matter are structured by channel, by discipline. Those are things that make sense on the inside, but actually for the customer, structuring it by community as you've done it so that somebody is owning the entire experience for a community is much more customer centric and um it kind of you know ties really well to some of the research that we did earlier this year around how we see challenger brands leveraging micro cultures to drive relevance with limited media budgets by really focusing on these communities being part of them understanding them finding ways you were talking about earlier to kind of drive word of mouth.

30:50So I think that, you know, that approach is something that, you know, it's not like everybody listening could shift to that tomorrow, but I think it's something to think about, like how your team structure reflects the customer centric and culturally centric way that you want to be perceived in a market. Bill, we've only got two minutes left. So I think I just want to touch quickly on, I think this topic of like mass market without mass market media, how do you become a mass market brand without having to outspend everybody and, you know, be the biggest spender in the category. So we'd love to hear you talk about that.

31:22You mentioned that people would be surprised at the level of paid media budget that you have. It'd be smaller than you would expect for a brand like Yeti. So how have you built a relatively mainstream brand without having to spend your way to the top? Yeah, I think, listen, and I'm all for great creative campaigns. I'm all for paid media, if it's done right, and all of those things. I really am. But for us, and you'll see it, we've done it in the past, and then we kind of break down, and it's like this invitation to a broader audience. We think that's important to spend into some broader paid media.

31:56But for us, it really goes back to that intimacy with communities. And so the way that we look at paid media is we really look at it on an endemic basis. We look at it, how we, how we, you know, and media. So, so it's, it's much more difficult nowadays because you have all the social channels. You have to understand where your people are showing up and watching and, and, and where they're really in tune. because I would argue that a hunting person that picks up, um, or a fishing person that picks up the Drake magazine, they're, they're picking that up to read it. And they're, they're giving their time to that publication and to show support of that publication is important to us where we could go and create a bunch of social content and put it on Tik TOK, which we do in the fishing space.

32:46um but the consumer who's watching that is like not nearly as as as in tune with the time they're giving over to that to to that piece of content or piece of media and so we look at it on where are our consumers um most receptive to the impact of the content that we're giving them and so the The endemic side of it is super important to us. But, you know, that's the balanced approach, though. And, you know, you will see we do do national campaigns and we do big spots. And it's just sort of the sprinkle of, hey, don't forget about us. Keep Yeti top of mind and key periods of times where we think the consumer could be thinking about Yeti and maybe getting one of our new products.

33:36But we dive into really the endemic and we look at each community as itself. and we advertise and spend our paid money, which is generally much more cost effective. And we think it just adds this sort of, if you know, you know, mentality to the communities within those spaces. And then when you start to add up all those communities that we're doing, it makes for a powerful sort of overarching, you know, group that you all, you know, become invited into the Yeti brand and in the ways that are important to the consumer. Love it. Well, this has been great. I've learned a lot. I hope other people have.