The Big Green Egg bills itself as a premium outdoor lifestyle brand. But what that means has changed since its founding in the ’70s, said Michele Morris, Head of U.S. Marketing for Big Green Egg.

To breathe “new life” into the brand, the grill brand is evolving its marketing strategy, bringing storytelling to the forefront and moving beyond just product-focused ads, Morris said.

“We’ve, for a variety of reasons, have been resting on our laurels and we have an opportunity to refresh the brand,” Morris said. “A lot of that new brand positioning is rooted in this concept of the experience over the product. So trying to pull forward gathering people together around a grill and your friends, your family and your neighbors together. It’s more about what you create and the experience you create, versus trying to force the product down your throat.”

Ace Hardware collaboration

Its most recent marketing initiative with this goal is a contest in collaboration with retail chain Ace Hardware. In the “Egg Your Neighbor” campaign, consumers submit a written entry about why their neighbor is an everyday hero who makes their community special. The brands will award 25 winners a large Big Green Egg grill package, plus Ace Hardware merchandise. Five grand prize winners will receive that plus tickets to Big Green Egg’s annual brand activation day “Eggtoberfest” at its Atlanta headquarters in October.

The brands received more than 1,200 entries to the content and they will announce the winners in September. Ace Hardware’s documentary

team will produce a spot for the five winners about why they are outstanding community members. This again highlights human storytelling and the spots will run through the fall grilling season.

Big Green Egg approached Ace Hardware as a partner for this contest campaign because they both have similar values of focusing on local neighborhoods and championing the community, Morris said. Local entrepreneurs own the majority of Ace Hardware’s 5,000 stores, according to its website. Ace is a cooperative business.

“On the Ace side, they had created this whole documentary series called Heartware Stories, and they’re similarly pulling forward the humans who are making a difference,” she said. “So we had a shared interest in this human storytelling as well.”

No big box stores

In fact, Big Green Egg does not sell its grills in big box retailers and works with 12 distributors to have its products sold in hyperlocal stores, Morris said.

“As we’ve gone through how do we continue to grow this business, the anchor point remains on providing the best customer experience, and we believe that that happens in those local stores where they can deliver that more personalized experience,” Morris said.

Contest goals

The goal for the contest campaign is to increase brand awareness for Big Green Egg, although Morris does not have a specific metric she is looking to achieve.

“Because this is the first time we’ve done something like this, it was a little bit hard to be able to do that measurement piece,” Morris said. “A lot of it being talking power, it’s not as linear to be able to tell that impact story.”

Big Green Egg conducts an annual brand awareness survey in August, which it will use to benchmark itself and to measure the effectiveness of all of its marketing initiatives.

The Big Green Egg is pleased with the number of contest entries. Plus, the initial press release reached 161 million people and its social media videos reached 30,000 consumers. Ace Hardware also had in-store signage about the contest, and about 300 consumers scanned the QR code that displayed more information.

How to navigate change with marketing shift

Word of mouth has sustained the 50-year-old brand, but at the start of 2025 it invested in audience segmentation to better understand its customers and its aspirational customers. It is now using this data for more targeted advertising and tracking.

As the Big Green Egg is working to shift its marketing message to be more approachable, it is trying to relay that energy to its distributors, who can then translate the message to stores and shoppers.

“A lot of our effort in this revitalization is getting people energized around the new life that we’re breathing into it,” Morris said. “It’s both in doing the work to show up in a new way, but then talking about doing the work to show up in a new way.”