Emily Kortlang: From Conversations to Change with Yerba Madre

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast. Today I’m speaking with Emily Kortlang, a seasoned brand storyteller who spent her career marketing for global brands from Red Bull to Beats by Dre to Apple. Now, Emily is the CMO of the recently rebranded Yerba Madre, formerly known as Guayakí. A certified B Corp, Yerba Madre aspires to create more than just profits with their yerba mate teas. With Emily’s guidance, they’re doubling down on the brand’s founding principles, protecting and regenerating the planet, empowering communities and sparking connections. Emily and her team are building something rare in consumer marketing, a brand strategy rooted in increasing dialogues, not just distribution. They’re growing their audience through a more personal approach that prioritizes conversations and listening by meeting people, introducing them to yerba mate and asking, “how does this make you feel?” The answers to that question have become the heart of their strategy and their success as the foremost yerba mate brand in the United States. Emily and Yerba Madre’s human-first, story-rich approach is not only refreshing in today’s highly saturated advertising landscape, it’s also deeply instructive for anyone looking to build a relationship with an audience that goes beyond product. Please join me in welcoming Emily Kortlang to the FoST podcast.

Emily, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast.

Emily Kortlang:

Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

We’ve had many CMOs over the years on the FoST podcast, but I believe that you are the first from a certified B corporation, and I’m so excited by that because it’s such an amazing certification and the cause-related nature of the company provides a very different set of storytelling and marketing challenges. So to start us off: you guys have recently gone through a rebranding. Tell us about that.

Emily Kortlang:

So very close to this podcast actually, we officially rebranded. It feels like it’s been years in the making, so good to finally be here or reveal it to the world, but we announced that we would be rebranding and changing our name from Guayakí to Yerba Madre. So we launched on Instagram and with our Ambacebador program and changed our web handles, website, and social handles all last week. And for us, the change is about doubling down on our core mission to support Mother Nature and Mother Earth. You mentioned we’re a B Corp, but I guess B Corp is kind of like just the start. We’re so much more than that in terms of what we’re trying to achieve. Calling yourself after Mother Earth and Mother Nature really puts that at the heart of our mission and the heart of our brand and remind us as employees every day that that’s why we come to work.

Charlie Melcher:

You mentioned that you’re so much more than a B corporation. In what ways are you so much more?

Emily Kortlang:

So whilst we’re a beverage company, we’re doing more than selling a beverage. We’re trying to create a movement, we call it the regenerative Business movement. So it’s about trying to balance planet people, profit and purpose, all in equilibrium. So whilst we harvest and grow and sell yerba mate, that’s just a means to an end for us to support the reforestation of the Atlantic Rainforest. Only a small percentage survives. And so when we harvest yerba mate in shade grown climates, that allows us to reforest the deforest parts of the Atlantic Rainforest. So kind of bring back the Atlantic rainforest and that’s something that we can all understand to get behind.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, most companies start just to make a profit and they don’t have a bigger mission behind them. You clearly do. And how else does that impact the nature of the business?

Emily Kortlang:

It impacts every tenet of the business really, everything from our supply chain to how we procure finance to how we market the product, the suppliers that we work with. It’s really embedded in the culture of the business. We’re not set up as—I dunno what you call it in this country, but—a limited company with what we’d be called in the U.K., but we’re a social purpose corporation or an SSP, which means that our legal structure mandates that the company prioritizes social and environmental objectives alongside profit. So it’s not just like a mission for a marketing purpose, it’s not just a mission that could be seen as just to sell a beverage. It really is about a movement of changing the way companies see and do business that you can balance profit and purpose and the product all in one. If you really are considering your supply chain in all the decisions that you’re making,

Charlie Melcher:

Do you ever have to make decisions that hurt your business model to support your cause?

Emily Kortlang:

It’s a challenge every day to always put purpose first, especially— we live in a capitalist society and there are points of tension within the business. Years ago, this business tried to do the right thing and move to a self-distribution model by using an all electric fleet. And this was a few years back when I don’t think the electric fleet market was where it possibly is today in terms of the range and mileage that you can get. But if you know anything about distribution, it’s all about the number of routes and the efficiency of routes that you can do and having to stop and charge isn’t about efficiency. So whilst the decision and the objective and the purpose of that change in terms of self-distribution via electric fleet was all with well intentions, it didn’t actually work as efficiently or effectively as we would’ve needed it to. And so that’s where the tension comes in, that you want to do the right thing, but sometimes there’s some challenges and things that hold you back. And in this case, the electric fleet that was available just wasn’t able to do the range and we had drivers sitting in lay-bys charging for an hour, two hours a day out of an eight-hour shift. You just don’t get the route efficiency that you need from a distribution of a beverage.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s a great example. And it’s also an example of being a little ahead of your time.

Emily Kortlang:

Exactly. And that’s what I say about this business. I think it was started 30 years ago and as soon as B Corp was announced, I think we were one of the first brands to be certified. We had been doing B Corp before it was B Corp. And so I think about the founders and when I talked to them about why they started this business and the stories, they were so ahead of their time and the product indeed I think was very ahead of its time. I don’t think that people 30 years ago were so aware of one organic or fair trade, fair for life, and I don’t think that consumers were looking for organic in beverage yet. Everybody understands organic in vegetables. You can kind of think about that: it’s organic, non GMO, that it wasn’t grown with pesticides or chemicals, but I don’t think that people have started to apply that thinking to beverage yet. And so for us having organic on the can is one something we’re very proud of. Two, it’s a good way of signifying that this product was grown and that it comes from nature and it’s natural. And 30 years ago, I don’t think people were looking for that in the beverage aisle, nor was it available.

Charlie Melcher:

So being ahead of its time, the company has had to focus on other things to tell its stories. Lots of people have adopted organic now and some even more for the marketing benefit of it than the planet benefit, but you have kind of the opposite scenario where you’ve done things that are before there’s even a consumer demand for it or a consumer value from it. I just think it touches on this sort of general interesting question, which is how does a company that’s so cause-driven approach, its marketing and storytelling that might be different from one that was very clear that it’s only priorities were sales?

Emily Kortlang:

Yeah, I think that when the founders started this business, they really had to approach it very differently. They never bought any advertising. They really started from a position of dialogue with consumers because they had such a story to tell about the sourcing, about the history of mate, about how different this product was, how it created a different feeling. They knew that they would never be able to cram all that into a 30-second ad and nor did they have the budget for it, but because they were like entrepreneurs, they toured natural food stores, which is where this product would best resonate and set up their store and talked all day to consumers. The consumer would ask, “what is it? What does it do?” And our founders would ask this really poignant question of like, “well, you drink it and you tell us how it makes you feel,” because the feeling of yerba mate is very different to other caffeinated beverages.

Consumers tell us it’s a compounding of different ingredients that create a feeling beyond caffeine. And so asking consumers, well, how does it make you feel immediately enters into a dialogue. And so you’re not just broadcasting your message, which is instantly forgettable, you’re entering into a conversation and then people can tell you their own personal story. So they’d spend days and hours just talking to consumers in natural food stores, learning about how people describe the feeling of what yerba mate does, but for them. But it also allowed them to tell their story. And that’s what kind of grew the brand. It was this word of mouth, it was this one-on-one communication. It was dialogue with the consumer and it was all these stories.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s so impressive that the company started by asking people, how do you feel? I mean, so the opposite of how almost every other company tries to market itself to tell you about themselves, it’s like the difference between an empathetic listener and a kind of self-centered egotist.

Emily Kortlang:

That’s really related to the culture as well, right? If your mission is to truly regenerate the Atlantic Rainforest and kind of bigger than that, save Mother Earth, then it isn’t an egotistical mission. So it isn’t about me and us, right? It’s about all of us together. And if that’s your mission, then that shapes the way you then have dialogue with your consumer because it’s not about telling, it’s about sharing, it’s also about the spirit of mate itself. It’s a 3000 year history of this product. The gourd and the bombilla bring people together and it’s meant to be shared in South America. You pass it around and you turn the gourd and people share a bombilla, or a straw, what we’d call it. And so the spirit of mate is really meant to be shared and sharing is a conversation. It’s about two-way. So I don’t think we’d ever be a broadcast brand does provide challenges as a marketeer. We’ve got to take a slower road, but what one that we feel is more impactful and more true to the DNA of this business.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell me a little bit about your background because you have come through a real history of big consumer brand marketing.

Emily Kortlang:

I’m from Hackney in East London, which I did ask Google what the equivalent was in the US and it’s kind of, they said either South Central or the Bronx. So an area that has had huge change over the last few decades in terms of its gentrification. So come from humble beginnings and really wanted to, I guess, get out, to be honest. Education was my route out. And when I got to university, I looked out my window and I saw a Red Bull car and I was like, what is that? Big silver, blue and red car with a huge can on the back? I said to someone, what is that? And they said, oh, that’s the Red Bull girl. And I was like, I do not know what the Red Bull girl is, but I’m going to find out. So I went looking and knocking on doors being like, anyone know who that car is? I was just fascinated by it. Found the Red Bull girl and she said, oh, actually I’m graduating this year. And it’s a program that you apply as a student, you get paid, you drive the car and you do marketing on campus. And I thought that sounded like the best job in the world. So I applied for the role, got the job, and I became the Red Bull girl on campus. And that was really my moment when I just fell in love with marketing.

Charlie Melcher:

So you started with drinks also?

Emily Kortlang:

I did start with drinks also. So I feel like I’ve come full circle and I think I did maybe longer than five years at Red Bull, and I felt like I needed to learn a lot more about the traditional style of marketing. So I went into advertising from there, worked at an agency, and then one day somebody called me and said, we are looking for somebody to come and work for a start-up called Beats by Dr. Dre. And I hadn’t really grown up with Dr. Dre, to be honest. We say we put the margins into headphones because at the time there was only Bose and Sennheiser that were operating very much in different realm to us in terms of their marketing and how they positioned their products. Took a very different style of approach to marketing a headphone brand and creating a culture and creating a movement.

Within four years, we sold for $3 billion to Apple and said, then I transitioned into the Apple ecosystem, very different obviously from a start-up and I did 10 years there. And I met somebody from Anthos, which is one of the investment partners into Yerba Madre, Guayakí at the time, who said, what exactly are you looking for? And I was like, well, I’d really like to work for a female CEO, which we had at the time. I want to work for a B Corp or a brand that’s going towards a B Corp. Didn’t want to go into a huge corporate conglomerate like Apple again. He said, well, I think I’ve got something for you. Have you heard of Guayakí? I didn’t grow up on the West coast so clearly I hadn’t never seen the little yellow can. But when I looked into the business, it really is like lightning in a bottle and it’s a great product to market. As a marketeer, you want to work on a product where you can go home at night and feel proud of what you’re selling into the world in terms of what I tell my kids I work on. And this is a brand where I can be really proud at the end of the day as to what I’ve sold.

Charlie Melcher:

So you’re somebody who has had a lot of different types of experiences and working with literally one of the biggest companies in the universe being Apple, where you’ve had many tools in your toolkit to be able to market and tell stories. But from your own description of Yerba Madre, it’s a company that’s trying to do things on a very intimate and conversational scale. How hard is it to try to do this marketing without being able to use the scattershot of advertising or some of the more mass tricks and techniques?

Emily Kortlang:

I’d say that it sounds theoretically challenging that it is possible. So at the moment we have a sampling program and we’ve always had a sampling program. This is something the founders always started with. Again, going back to the natural food stores, they would always sample the product. It’s very typical within beverage. Try the product, become a consumer, buy the product. And we have a sampling program currently that operates in a number of cities and we’ll sample a million consumers this year. And our job is really to make sure that every single one of those interactions is a positive experience. We want to spend, sorry, someone’s knocking on my door. Hello.

Charlie Melcher:

FedEx delivery.

FedEx Guy:

I need a signature. I’m sorry.

Emily Kortlang:

I’ve in a nursing room, so it’s been interesting that you found me. Anyway, let me talk about the sampling program. So we have a sampling program that operates nationally across the country, and we have a fleet of Rivians and a team of ambassadors that go and sample our product, meet consumers, tell them about the story of yerba mate, ask them how it makes them feel. We’ve kept that true to our DNA. And this year we’ll sample, I think, a million consumers.

Now, my challenge is how do you get that to 10 million consumers? You need more people, more stories, more Rivians. It is possible. It’s just more difficult because some brands will get to the point where you get to a million consumers, you can keep your sampling program, but you need more reach. So then they tend to advertising because advertising is the most effective and efficient way to grow awareness. So we feel like meeting our consumers one-to-one is what has growing this brand and is why we’ve been so successful. If it’s not broken, like don’t fix it. And so we’ll continue to grow in this way. And I think it’s a fun challenge as a marketeer to have different tools in your toolbox and not operate the same model from an adjacent business, but it’s also taking what has historically worked for this brand and why we’ve become the leader in this category and giving it the scale it needs.

Charlie Melcher:

I think most people in your shoes coming in would have thought about the big national advertising campaigns. They would think about how can they turbocharge growth and take this very sweet and quaint model that was impactful but not easily scalable and go to the more traditional methods. Have you tried that or considered it?

Emily Kortlang:

Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about it and debating in my mind whether I could do it in a way that stayed true to the DNA of the business. And I think what I’ve come to the conclusion is probably not, it would probably be a shift change for the last 30 years in the style of how this brand is growing, but also I feel like I’ve got other levers that I can pull that are as effective. And so then it’s not as necessary or needed. We’ve got strong social media presence, which we can grow and scale. We’ve got a strong ambassador program, which we can turn into a creator program and a creator program is how you can get reach and scale organically and authentically. You use the power of the internet and young people with mobile phones to create content on your behalf.

So it’s organically scaling content. And we’ve got a program of 10,000 ambassadors that can tell us and tell their communities because each of them have a community of people that follow them, that on their social media, they could go on a reach. One of the biggest assets that you’ve got in beverage is distribution. That’s the number one way you’re going to create awareness is just shelf space, hence. So we’ve got a fabulous partner in my chief commercial officer and chief distribution officer in terms of making sure that we’re in all the natural food stores from Whole Foods to Sprouts, but then gaining additional distribution in main chain as well as convenience.

Charlie Melcher:

And they’ll take you without national advertising, I guess if you have enough of a following, they will.

Emily Kortlang:

Exactly. So that’s the story that you need to tell in these meetings with retailers is that this is a brand that’s growing and we can show the data that suggests, and we’re doing it without advertising. And so if the numbers are good, something’s working. And so that’s all about the storytelling of how the marketing is working because our velocities are up, our household penetration is up, our distribution is up. And so I think there’s a certain confidence from retailers that this is a brand—one to watch.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, maybe now the rest of the world’s catching up with you, you’re not so far ahead of your time, you’re of your time.

Emily Kortlang:

Maybe. I do feel like the time is now. I feel like there is an exodus from synthetic sources of caffeine or energy. I feel like the younger consumer is very conscious of what they put into their body, more than our generation was. They’re very questioning of ingredients. They’re label readers. They’re very demanding of brands, so they expect more and they are more likely to buy into brands than an older generation that have purpose over profit. So I feel like the time is now for us because we’ve got an organic product. We know that young people want better for their body. We’ve got a balance of what we are doing for the planet, and we know that young people are more likely to vote with their dollar and choose a product that is better for the environment and better for the world.

Charlie Melcher:

Are there other things that you do that are experiential or event-based?

Emily Kortlang:

So we show up at a lot of festivals. We feel like they’re the perfect environment for us. They’re a euphoric moment where people have a good time, they experience a high, and it’s a shared experience. You go with friends. And so mate is meant to be shared. So we have a roaming what we call mateada, which is a space where people can come together, they can try a product, they can learn how to pack a gord, they can share a and interact with the brand. So we’ll be at about 10 festivals this year, and that’s kind of our experiential arm.

Charlie Melcher:

Is there anything that you’ve learned in your time with a company that was surprising or just very different than what you’d experienced before?

Emily Kortlang:

I think that what’s been most surprising to me is the depth of consumer love. People love Red Bull. People love Apple, but I think this feels different to me. I went to either University of Santa Barbara to meet some ambacebadors. 20 of them showed up to meet me. They were remarkably engaged and intrigued and wanted a conversation. And we sat on the lawn and we talked for half an hour, 40 minutes about this brand and the product. And they asked all sorts of questions about the mission, about the purpose, and about what flavors we’ve got coming up and can we get stickers and when are you bringing out merch? And I generally walked away from that thinking, wow, this is different because I’ve never been to worked on a brand where I’ve had that level of consumer questioning, I guess as a CMO, as to what we are doing. Where are we going? How can we help? How can we be involved? Coming up with flavor ideas, coming up with packaging ideas, designing posters and designing hoodies and sending us letters and sending us letters of love and admiration. Every week we get physical posts of people writing handwritten letters. This is not the older generation that are used to writing letters. This is the younger generation that had to go out of their way to find a piece of paper and a pen and an envelope and find a stamp and a postbox, which is—

Charlie Melcher:

And a stamp. Yeah, that’s—

Emily Kortlang:

And a stamp! To send us a physical letter… The most recent one was a thank you that something along the lines of, “you got me through college. I’m so glad that I graduated. I’m really proud. And I couldn’t have done it without you.” And I don’t think I’ve ever received mail before as a CMO. So those sorts of moments where you look at your desk and you’ve got a letter from a consumer are very different, I think.

Charlie Melcher:

I guess there’s really a difference between love for a product and feeling like you’re part of a bigger cause and maybe that’s it. I mean, Apple’s got unbelievable product passion, but I don’t know that people feel like they’re saving the world because they’re part of Apple.

Emily Kortlang:

And that’s why we say we’re more than a beverage. We’re selling a beverage, but it’s a means to an end for a movement. And so if consumers can feel part of that movement, it is a deeper connection.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, a lot of companies, I think, are looking to have that kind of dialogue with their customers, and they’re aspiring to be able to have those kinds of ambassadors. They have turned their customers into their advocates, but they have the challenge, which is their product and company history doesn’t really deliver on the promise.

Emily Kortlang:

Well, it’s never too late to start.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s true. That’s true. And I hope many more will join the B Corp certification, the organic, and just being part of a bigger mission beyond bottom line.

Emily Kortlang:

I mean, yeah, we welcome any brands into the movement and try to, in terms of our partnerships, try to find brands that are aligned to those values and all boats rise in high tides. So we welcome other yerba mate brands also into the movement.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just want to say, Emily, thank you for taking the time to speak with us, to share your journey. I just think it’s amazing that you went from the Red Bull Girl to the CMO of Yerba Madre. Such a perfect sort of journey, if you will, from one caffeinated drink to another, but for a much more thoughtful and mature approach. So again, thank you so much. It’s been really an honor to chat with you and learn more about the brand and the amazing work you’re all doing.

Emily Kortlang:

Appreciate it. Thanks for the time.

Charlie Melcher:

This has been The Future of Storytelling podcast. I’m Charlie Melcher. Thanks for listening. Like Yerba Madre, we at FoST are proud to be driven by a mission that we believe in: that creating better stories will help us to create a better future. To learn more about us, check out our website at fost.org. There you’ll find more episodes of this show and you can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.