A Trip to the Oregon Coast

And a lesson in brand storytelling

I took a trip to the Oregon coast last week with the family, and we stopped at the Tillamook Creamery. My son loved the cheese samples, I geeked out on the branding genius (and also loved the cheese samples). Seriously, this place is a masterclass in brand storytelling.

You immediately feel like you’re walking into a kind of historic institution and that, just by being there, you’re part of its mission.

Tillamook is a farmer-owned co-op that started in 1909 with ten dairies putting in ten dollars each. One of the first things you see at the creamery is a visual chronology of that history. There are pictures of farmers and their families, Tilly the cow mascot, “Cheese Girls” at the state fair, quality inspectors in crisp uniforms. The message you get is: We’re proud of our deep, hard-earned history, so you should be too.

Upstairs there’s an interactive education center with a life-sized plastic cow and illustration of the feeding process. There were smiles on every kid’s face in that room as they moved through each part of the farmer’s journey and even got to practice with a real milking machine.

We then walked through a hall filled with giant windows looking down on the factory floor, where real cheese makers were hard at work. It wasn’t a show; they were literally making the product that goes on grocery store shelves. Window after window we watched the entire process, all the way to shrink wrapping the final packaging.

Next we stopped by the sample station, where our son chomped away on a little hunk of cheddar and we stuffed ourselves with cubes of truffle-infused cheese. By this point, we were fully bought in. Naturally, we headed straight for the gift shop, where my wife immediately picked up a block of that same truffle cheese and a t-shirt for our little boy. I scoured the special reserve cheeses proudly displaying the Morning Star, the ship Tillamook’s original families built and used for dairy transport more than 150 years ago. In lieu of a bag, we put all our souvenirs in a repurposed mint chocolate chip ice cream tub and headed on our way.

Years ago in grad school, I remember a definition I was once given for branding was “manufactured meaning.” That definition never sat well with me. Is that our job? To manufacture meaning? Out of what?

At Tillamook, the word I kept returning to was “real.” The history, the people, and, most importantly, the food. It all felt real because it was real. There was no meaning to manufacture, because meaning was already there.

The factory told the story of a community that cares about what they make as much as you care about what’s on your kid’s plate. It told a story of hard work, community values, and a commitment to quality, and that’s a story any visitor would want to be a part of. That’s the magic of a brand that lives by what it stands for.

It doesn’t take a 100 years or a co-op to earn that kind of brand love. What it does take is commitment to a set of values, and the willingness to invest in the few things that matter most to you.