Yeti's VP of Marketing on Entering a New Product Category When Your Brand Is Already an Eponym

For marketers, becoming a well-loved brand that's interchangeable with an entire product category can be the ultimate dream. But what about after that? Yeti, a brand name that's come to stand in for high-quality travel mugs and indestructible coolers, recently expanded beyond those categories with a new line of luggage. Adweek caught up with the Yeti's marketing lead, Paulie Dery, to discuss what that means for a brand that's established such a strong recognition with its initial offerings. Dery joined Yeti in 2019 after three years at Uber, leaving his role as executive creative director for one of the most recognized brands in the world and biggest disruptors of the decade to join a mug and cooler startup in Austin, Texas. It was a move that many people questioned, Dery said, but he maintains that the Yeti gig is the "best job in—not just Texas, but I think—the world." At the beginning of this year, he was promoted to vp of marketing for the brand. The following has been edited for clarity and brevity. Adweek: How did you find your way to Yeti? What drew you to the brand? Paulie Dery: Yeti was 10 years old when I started, maybe a billion dollars. If you're in the valley, that's a unicorn. I looked at it as a great startup with a product that's the best that was ever built and will ever be built. I was excited by it. Yeti marketing started with a great story of depth—two brothers in the fishing community, frustrated with what they had, built something better. It was that grassroots momentum that kicked the brand off. Fishermen and fishing guides loved it and talked about the benefits of it. They were ahead of their time in understanding that doing right by that community is all that we should focus on. But then we saw the relevance of the product pop up in other places—in the hunting world or the ranching world. And you start to see the product becoming really relevant. Can you describe your marketing strategy at Yeti? I always say that we don't create our own tracks, we follow the tracks. We want to see if a community truly adopts the product, and if there's a real relevance for our product in that community. If there is then it means that they need need us and it's interesting. Another thing I always say is we will support the community, not sponsor the community. We don't turn up to hang banners—we're interested in what the community needs. Sometimes that means we buy full-page ads in magazines you've never heard of, with the circulation that you probably laugh at. We do it because if we don't put our ad there, maybe that publication goes away, maybe they can't pay their bills, and that hurts the community. We slowly move into these communities in a thoughtful way. We're not going to go out and sponsor a big event out of the gates if we're not relevant. Because our authenticity, our brand and doing right by the community is the absolute most important thing. We're building this brand for the next 100 years. Once we have these very deep relationships and ambassadors in communities, we start telling stories to people about it and reaching more people. They are stories we love telling, and we think stories people like watching. But more importantly, I think it's a great introduction to the things we love. It's about introducing people to our way of life and the interesting people that make up our communities. YETI VP Paulie Dery on Reveling in Risk and Building Brands Through Community You have this brand name that's become really category defining—people will simply say "my Yeti" to refer to their mug or cooler. How do you expand that into bags? These things have to be made for the absolute tip of the spear, the toughest of the tough, the most well-designed of the designed. If it holds true to all of the principles that make it a mug or a cooler, then it's still a Yeti. We say no to a lot of products—it's got to live up to the label. Marketing can't make a product better, and I never want to be in a position where I have to. We didn't look at bags and go, "Oh, here's a huge market opportunity" and think we could whack our logo on this piece of luggage and do great. We saw our ambassadors and our communities hauling stuff to their pursuits that wasn't quite up to their expectations. We have people going into the deepest jungles and craziest places on the planet and they're lugging luggage that often can't live up to it. We worked very closely with our ambassadors, asking, "What do you need? What drives you nuts? Where are the breaking points?" In pure Yeti style, we used the stuff they put on airbags and abrasion jackets and stuff. But that's, that's where we start to make it a Yeti. And so we look at the tough skin, and then we think about is as a marketing message. Our ambassadors are the best of the best because they have tough skin, they often fail, they get knocked around, they get dragged under waves. We landed on a line for the campaign, "Get out what you put in." You go to quite a bit of effort to get to some of the things we love, but it's rewarding. We think if it's harder to do, then it's more rewarding. That was very true of the bags, too, it was quite a journey for us to get to a bag we really loved. It's functional—you put stuff in, and you should be able to get it out dry and get it out organized and and all that good stuff. It holds true to the design principles and holds true to what our ambassadors want. That's really important. Yeti Is Auctioning Off Coolers Designed by 37 Musicians to Support Concert Industry Workers