“The sleeping giants woke up, and the sleeping giants were very angry.” No, it’s not a line from a fairy tale but rather a quote from Peter McGuinness, chief marketing and brand officer at Chobani, who was speaking at The Big Rethink 2014 US, a marketing conference hosted by the Economist. The line, in reference to a very real story, got quite a few laughs from the audience. It is, however, no laughing matter to the yogurt brands that have been mightily surpassed in market share by this new category leader over the last five or six years. Any way you measure it, “zero to over one billion dollars in five years,” or “52 percent market share in eight years,” it sounds more like the tech category, not Greek yogurt. In fact, I read that a venture capitalist remarked of Chobani, “If you examined its fiscal returns and blocked out its name, you’d think it was a software company.”
So how does this level of brand success happen? The answer is embedded in the preceding question: “how.” As I heard McGuinness recount the tale of Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani’s founder and CEO, who married his passion for the Turkish yogurt of his boyhood with the serendipitous availability of an old yogurt factory in upstate New York, what struck me was that it was nothing extraordinarily creative or exciting that prompted the brand’s rise from last to first so quickly. Ulukaya was, in fact, just following the rules of Branding 101. They were not, however, the rules from the year 2000 but from the year 2014. What I mean is that, sure, for a brand to be successful, it needs to offer something relevantly different by way of a product or service. And, yes, the brand has to ensure that it meets, if not exceeds, expected standards of quality for whatever the brand is. But more than this, the rules of 2014 dictate that for a brand to get and keep an edge, it has to focus on a story that is deeper than just “what” it does. Smart brands recognize that consumers are increasingly connecting with “how” companies behave and “why” they do the things they do. In a marketplace where everything is transparent, it’s become imperative for companies to not just say the right thing but to do the right thing. In other words, companies have to live their values and imbue their products and services with these values.
Now, lest you think I’m onto some epiphany here, I’m not. Many marketers, and those who write about marketing, have come to grasp the importance of “how” in building a powerful brand. Dov Seidman, for example, founder and CEO of LRN, a company that helps other companies “do the right thing,” is the author of the best-selling book HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything. In an interview I did with Seidman a year or so ago, he told me, “Business, any business, is about winning by gaining advantage, doing proprietary things. Just like my family can’t copy your family, my culture can’t copy your culture. We want to make culture a strategy for winning.”
In other words, it’s no longer enough to compete on table stakes, be it building a better mousetrap, or yogurt. Rather, to win in today’s market, with today’s savvy consumers, you have to build your differentiation on trust and values. And that’s exactly what Chobani did. From day one, it understood that when those sleeping giants wake up (and they did,
“You can’t operate on ‘how matters’ if you can’t back it up,” McGuinness said during his presentation. “Lots of brands jump on the ‘we care’ platform, but people know if it’s sincere or not. You can spend 100 million dollars on advertising, but if your point of view isn’t authentic, it doesn’t matter. Your point of view needs to be supported by your actions. How we do things is a real articulation of what we’ve always been about.”
From my side of the spoon, as a marketer and a consumer, Chobani does practice what it preaches, whether it’s the fresh milk from the humanely treated cows, the company’s relationships with the farmers who tend the cows and the fruit trees, or the consumers—Olympic athletes included— who count on the naturally sourced ingredients to keep them fit. Equally important, when mold was discovered in a small number of packages last year, the company owned up to the issue honestly, quickly, and proactively, using "how" as a branding guideline for good, and less than good, times.
As I said earlier, Chobani’s incredible rise was not based on anything magical or even overly creative, for that matter. It was a sharper execution and delivery against a deeper, more emotionally resonant brand idea. It has linked itself to consumers in a more meaningful, more comprehensive way than just a product feature. Chobani conveys the right message for a market that has become increasingly aware of ingredients and health, certainly, but also of the culture of the companies behind the products they buy.
Chobani tastes good. Chobani is good for you. But the brand story goes deeper than that. It’s good for the community. It’s good for the planet. As McGuinness explained, “It’s a way of doing things, of treating people, not just making things. You don’t have to choose between caring and being ambitious.” At 52 percent market share and growing, I’d say “how” Chobani continues to build its brand should keep all giants up at night.
