How YETI used Community Marketing, and Storytelling to Make Coolers a Status Symbol and build a $3.38B Brand

YETI harness community marketing, partnerships and beautiful storytelling to build a $3.38B position in the outdoor industry and coolers that are as at home in the Hamptons as they are on a duck hunt

Who will love this:

• People who think spending $1,000 on a cooler is ridiculous

• People who think spending $1,000 on a YETI is justified

• You’re a fisher, hunter, surfer, equestrian, skier or otherwise outdoors adjacent person who’s wondering how the heck YETI burst onto the scene

Today

Good morning!

I yanked my shorts and Birkenstocks out of storage this past week, spotted the northern lights, and bought a tomato plant at the farmers market which means one thing: we are in the countdown to summer 🥳

It’s only fitting that I kick off summer by writing about the only cooler brand worth mentioning: YETI. For the uninitiated, YETI are the Gucci of coolers: as at home in the Hamptons as it is on a duck hunt.

What I love the most about YETI is that it’s a business that understands the case for brand and is playing the long game. I’m also a sucker for a brands who understand community, invest in 🔥 in-house agencies and have a track record of beautiful video content.

YETI deliver the holy grail of both serious, and sustainable growth and ad-industry accolades: 

• $3.38B market cap (in just 18 years)

• DTC sales grew to $652.9M for the first nine months of 2023, a 7% increase over the same time period in 2022

• Nabbed Ad Age’s ‘In-house agency of the year’ for 2024

• and Fast Company ‘most innovative company of the year’

📣 Community shoutout 📣

Speaking of growth, a quick shoutout to the following readers who have generously shared this newsletter and referred new readers! 🥳

• Mark Liney, executive level brand builder, founder of Rokne, a brand strategy studio, and founder of Monika, an AI naming tool for tomorrow’s companies

• Nicole Dennis, founder of Cobalt Engagement, a co-design and strategy studio based in Sydney, Australia doing important work to improve resilience and adaptation in communities affected by climate change

As a reminder, you can find your referral 🔗 down the bottom of this email.

OK! Let’s dive into YETI. 

🧊🧊🧊

HOW YETI USES BRAND TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE GROWTH ENGINE

Background

YETI was founded in Austin, Texas out of Roy and Ryan Seider’s garage in 2006. By 2008 the company are selling their hero product. In 2012, private equity buys a majority share in the company for an undisclosed sum. In 2014 the Rambler Tumblers are launched, and ten years later YETI are racking up awards for Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company, Ad Age’s In-House Agency of the Year, and clocked a $3.38B market cap.

There’s no doubt about it: YETI make great product. There is no brand or marketing substitute for this. Any cooler that can keep ice cool for days, doubles as a seat, and is a target for thieves has probably earned it’s cult status. What YETI has done incredibly well is stoke the cult and paradoxically, slow their growth to build their brand instead of allowing it to become a flash in the pan.

YETI have repeatedly demonstrated that they understand the value of brand, building a strong foundational brand, then investing in leadership that understands brand (CMO Paulie Dery, ex-RGA ECD), and investing in an in-house agency back in 2019.

We’re going to dive into four pillars of the brand’s strategy:

1. Build for specific pursuits

2. Demonstrate feats of strength

3. Depth, then breadth

4. Respectful storytelling

Build for specific pursuits 🎣

YETI was founded by two brothers who wanted a hardworking cooler for fishing. Building for very specific outdoor pursuits was foundational to their early success and became one of their brand pillars.

What’s most interesting to me is what YETI didn’t do. They didn’t rely on Facebook advertising alone (a popular DTC move). Instead, they looked at where their audience would be and geared their distribution strategy around that, selling out of Cabela’s and Bass Pro shops: specialized hunting, fishing and camping retailers

Why this matters: YETI doubled down on the customers who already loved their product, allowing them to build their brand instead of chasing a (potentially) faster growth curve online.

Demonstrate feats of strength 💪

YETI’s products are incredibly durable. Rather than tell people they have a high quality product, YETI have chosen to show the strength of the product. One of company’s early ads was a grizzly bear attacking (and failing) to open a YETI cooler.

Why this matters: YETI's confidence to show their products in use in the wild (not perched on a city park) is a strategic choice to appeal to their core customer who plays hard outside.

Depth, then breadth 🤿

YETI don’t fangirl over attention they get from any old outdoor community. Instead, they wait until a community discovers YETI, and then cultivate those relationships. Today, YETI is a staple in the BBQ community, the ranching community, the fishing community, surf, skate, and backcountry: but it wasn’t always that way. Take surfing, for example.

“I look at the surf community: a very insular, tight knight community that love us because our products work so well and represented us so well. It’s that type of growth that has spawned great financial growth for the business, but it’s been done so thoughtfully. We’ve been quite restrained.”

I really dig YETI CMO Paulie Dery’s approach here, and it’s one most CMOs either can’t (CEO, board, shareholder pressure) or won’t take (see previous list - there’s a reason the CMO is the shortest tenured role in the C-suite). The fact that YETI took the time to build relationships over 10 years (their estimate) with the surfing community, they’ve been able to get to know people, support the foundations that the surf community are passionate about, and prove they weren’t going to take advantage of their relationships. They have surf ambassadors like John John Florence, Stef Gilmore and big wave surfing Malloy brothers Keith and Dan, and now - a real foothold in the surfing community that could only be built through time and authentic relationship building.

This is counter to a typical growth-at-all costs approach that can’t wait for relationships to be built - but it’s proven tremendously successful for YETI.

Why this matters: Most companies don't have the patience to allow brand love to build over time - or invest the resources needed to successfully cultivate these relationships. But YETI is proving that this play pays off.

Respectful storytelling 📚

Once they’ve established relationships within communities, YETI begins to tell the stories of those communities - because they’ve been allowed in. 

YETI has released over 75 films since 2015, and invested in storytelling early on, first by partnering with ambassadors and adventure film directors like Ben Moon. It’s clear that from the jump they understand the importance of good storytelling. Now, the brand have an in-house agency and produce all of their work - from banners to billboards - in house.

Film grants as a non-traditional influencer marketing

They’ve also taken things a step further, launching the Pretty Wild Fellowship in partnership with Academy Award-winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, and the storytelling nonprofit Points North Institute, which will award four filmmakers $50,000 each and provide mentorship throughout film development.

Why content? Telling brand stories drives the depth of connection that YETI has with its customers. It’s easy to forget about the core communities that build a brand, and many companies forget about them as they chase growth. YETI hasn’t. One of my faves: ‘The Captain’: a story of a female lobster fisherwoman - one of the 4% of commercial fishing license holders in Maine.

YETI tell stories that respect the intelligence and the outdoor acumen of their audience: from surfing the fisherman to backcountry skiers. And while they’ve historically done really high quality film work, they’re not limited to the screen.

Doing things that become stories worth talking about

YETI run campaigns that are worth talking about (and most marketing, isn’t!)

• YETI ran a Craigslost campaign to launch their new gear organizer ‘go boxes’. The campaign idea was sparked from the number of people posting ads about missing gear on Craigslist after outdoor adventures gone awry, and unsuspecting Craiglist posters were delighted by YETI ambassadors like mountaineer Conrad Anker picking out missing gear and sending it to them

• YETI put out a ‘year in preview’ in December 2022 that helped people plan a YETI curated list of outdoor activities, while racking up more than 200M impressions

• YETI launched “Map the Gaps”, a campaign to send 13 adventurers (and YETI ambassadors) out with a GoPro and YETI products on a mission to map some of the 2% of the world that hasn’t been mapped by Google. The campaign snagged pictures from rainforests in British Columbia, mountains in Australia, and deserts in Santa fe, which all got uploaded to Google Street View as a result.

Why this matters: Long form content production is a brand play (focused on a long time horizon). YETI's commitment to high quality production and storytelling focused on their communities has successfully built their brand as THE cooler for people who want to stay out longer, travel farther and live harder. 

Bonus: Buybacks and Used Gear

A bonus find while I was researching YETI: their sustainability commitments.

There’s an inherent tension in businesses that sell product with protecting our planet (and us!) from cheap crap: what Patagonia calls the Shitthropocene. So it was refreshing to see that YETI have a Rambler buy-back program and that they sell used gear on a dedicated site called YETI rescues.

Why this matters: Walking your talk is a simple brand move, but few companies actually do it. YETI is a brand that helps people get out to wild places. Doing their bit to protect wild places by reducing waste is the least they can do, but it's more than most companies to.

Summary

YETI shows us the power of strategic, sustainable growth by going deep on the ‘tip of the spear’: engaging their most outdoorsy customers, building their reputation over time through mega high-quality storytelling, community marketing and entertaining activations, and refusing to water down their proposition.

May we all be as cool as YETI.

And with that, I’m off to a trail race for the weekend! Wish me luck! ✌️

Amanda

P.S. Want a hand building a brand that drives business results? Book a discovery call with me to figure out where your brand is (and how to take it to the next level).

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