How Storytelling Fueled Chobani’s Meteoric Rise
Hey Rhetors,
In 2005, Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya looked at his local grocery store’s dairy aisle shelves with a heavy sigh. None of the sugary, watery yogurts could remind him of his home in Turkey, where yogurt was thicker, and higher in protein. In fact, the small-time businessman longed for that taste so much that he made yogurt in his own home for a time.
So when Ulukaya found out that a local Kraft factory was closing near his current business, the immigrant seized the opportunity and bought it with the capital he had from his previous ventures. Thus started the now-famous dairy company Chobani and a craze that would flip the yogurt industry on its head.
Within 5 years, Chobani became the top Greek yogurt brand in America, and today, the company is worth approximately $20 billion and the top yogurt brand in America period. How did Ulukaya flip the market so quickly? Remember, this wasn’t your current-day protein-crazed America, this was 2005-2007, where low-carb diets like Keto or Paleo were in their infancy, and whey protein still lived just in the gym-bro’s shelf.
The answer is storytelling. In fact, Chobani got popular because they repeatedly told the story I just told you above to a wide audience. So why storytelling? Glad you asked.
How Storytelling Connects Everyone
I could have started this post with something like “Chobani’s success didn’t just come from their pricing strategy, it came from their storytelling expertise. Here’s why.” That feels like I’m ramming an idea down your throat though, right? Sure, the sentence is concise, but it doesn’t connect or engage with you in the way that the story can.
Storytelling is a skill programmed into each one of us. Way before any other form of communication, humans were telling stories around a campfire to entertain each other and connect. And we all still do it today.
Unfortunately, a lot of stories we tell suck. Sometimes, we even mislabel communication as a story. Think about when a toddler comes up to you and you ask, “What did you do today?” Since they have no storytelling skills yet, they usually just rattle off a bunch of random stuff that happened to them. That’s not really a story, but a list. Companies do this too. If you take a look at a company website, chances are you’ll see a page or section under their About Us labeled “Our Story,” and it’ll just be a timeline of dates and happenings.
So below (and I promise I’ll get back to Chobani at the end), here’s a ridiculously simple model of storytelling that I found recently and that you can take into the next week to tell better stories.
Three Easy Steps for Every Story
There’s a million different ways to tell a story. There’s the Hero’s Journey, storygraphs, archetypes, the STAR method, Boy Meets Girl, so on and so forth.
But to Kindra Hall, author of Stories That Stick, there’s just one overall framework that defines all of these, and one that I’ve recently bought into that can help anyone tell a story: Normal, Explosion, New Normal. Let’s break it down:
1. Normal
In the beginning, there was…what? All you have to do to start a good story is give us a situation. Everything in this world could be amazing, or everything could be terrible. What matters at this point is that you ground your audience in the situation with relatable characters and details. In Chobani’s story, we get Ulukaya sighing at the dairy shelf. Who hasn’t done that in a grocery store when they can’t find the thing they’re looking for?
2. Explosion
Hall tells us to think of this word in relation to something happening. Whether you or something else makes that event doesn’t matter either, just as long as your audience knows that this is where the status quo of the previous situation is changing. For Ulukaya, this was finding out about the closed Kraft factory, and taking a bet that he could make better yogurt for the US market.
3. New Normal
As soon as the explosion ends, tell us the result. What’s changed? Why does it matter to the characters or the audience? Whether it’s happy or sad that things have changes is your choice based on what emotion you want to leave the audience. In the story above, Chobani became a multi-billion dollar company.
Now that you know the basic building blocks, you can see that at each step, I’ve mentioned some sort of engagement with an audience, and that’s the point: by telling a story, you engage the audience in a way that our brains like to be engaged.
How Chobani Shared Its Story
Many companies share stories through advertising campaigns. But that costs thousands, sometimes millions of dollars to produce. Plus, some of those “stories” aren’t really stories, but lists of features or slogans or timelines like I mentioned above. Those strategies have their time and place, but to change a culture, Chobani leaned on its story in these ways.
First, within many grocery stores, Chobani did intense sampling programs in grocery stores so they could get in front of customers to tell their story. As you got a small cup, you also got a story to hook you in as you tasted an untraditional type of product at the time. There’s positive association alone of hearing how an immigrant wanted to share something good tasting with others to the product.
Second, in the early days, the number on every Chobani cup was a direct line to Ulukaya’s business phone. Can you imagine Jeff Bezos putting his number on every Amazon package in the early days? But the point was that if anyone called, Ulukaya had a chance to tell his story again and win over a customer.
Lastly, Chobani was one of the first companies to encourage user-generated content. To push the story beyond Ulukaya’s mouth, users could now continue the story of how Chobani is different for them as well. Further engagement, and further storytelling!
This Week: Tell a Story
I’ve already gone way too long for this post, so I’ll keep it simple for you this week: use Normal, Explosion, and New Normal when you tell a story next. It could be for a coworker, a partner, or a friend. Tell the story!
Talk soon,
Tim
Curation Corner
If this is your first TWR post, here’s the skinny. Every week, I put together the following, so you can explore communication related and adjacent works by people much more creative and skilled than me! Take a look at this week’s below:
Quote of the Week: “He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ralph_waldo_emerson_121501#:~:text=Ralph%20Waldo%20Emerson%20%2D%20He%20who,Life%20Fear%20Learning%20Who%20Learned
Video of the Week: “Dollar Shave Club – Our Blades Are F**king Great.” by Dollar Shave Club. An awesome ad: https://youtu.be/ZUG9qYTJMsI?si=ybEHsv32CuRFIs6f
Podcast of the Week: “What it means to truly pay attention (w/ Kevin Townley).” by How to Be a Better Human. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ItnlhN9VGokKGPRyx9Qzj?si=3f7096e05eef4056
Book of the Week: Stories that Stick, by Kindra Hall. The inspiration for this week’s post! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42772139-stories-that-stick