When most people think of Land O’Lakes, they think of its butter. They don’t think of the zoo.
But as a farm-owned cooperative, the company actually has a broad footprint in agriculture. That includes, besides dairy products, data-driven tools to protect crops, and a sizable animal nutrition arm.
“Even though you know us for our dairy products and our butter and cheese, it’s the smallest part of our business,” said company CMO Heather Malenshek on stage at Marketing Vanguard’s invite-only session during ADWEEK’s September Brandweek event. “We feed about 100 million animals a day. We feed zoo animals.”
That expansiveness is as much an opportunity as it is a challenge. It’s tough to find an authentic way for a brand with so many diverse interests to go to market cohesively—especially when it’s trying to participate in the cultural conversation.
Malenshek spoke with ADWEEK’s chief brand and community officer Jenny Rooney onstage about how she’s cracked that problem.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow.
ADWEEK: What’s your background?
HEATHER MALENSHEK: Previous to Land O’Lakes, I was the CMO at Harley-Davidson for about six and a half years. I was the first female CMO and one of only two CMOs.
I’ve actually had the opportunity to work on some incredible legacy brands in my career. I’ve worked on the Jeep brand when I was on the agency side. I worked on Budweiser. I worked way too long on Bud Light, just like working with a frat party every day. And I worked, obviously, at Harley-Davidson, which is an amazing brand. I’m a rider at heart, so it was great.
When I came to Land O’Lakes, I had really no idea what Land O’Lakes had to offer until I spoke to the CEO, [Beth Ford], who I fell in love with immediately—her leadership and how she cares so deeply about what we do.
You’ve led transformations in brands with deeply loyal, sometimes fiercely protective audiences. How do you tell the difference between what’s authentically core to it and what’s just the way it’s always been done?
We’re 106 years old, and after 106 years, there are a lot of practices that are part of what the company does. When I joined six years ago at Land O’Lakes, I was blown away by how diverse the businesses were. We have three distinct businesses with different audiences and different goals. It felt very siloed to me.
But we have this amazing enterprise that we all have a commitment to farmers.
I got to talk to a ton of people across the organization, including the wonderful people that work in our plants and manufacturing facilities, to really dig into the stories of the organization. From there, I worked with this cross-functional team beyond marketing to think about what really is our story that we want to tell, what is the platform that we want to sit on.
We developed a platform called Rooted in Tomorrow, and that was done with operations people, with finance people, supply chain, marketing on top of that.
Our farmers are always evolving because they have to, and so we need to do the same thing.
What’s a moment, maybe even a mistake, that taught you where the line sits between genuine cultural participation and a brand overreach?
It has to be core to the people that you serve and the communities that you serve, because if it isn’t, they will sniff it out in a heartbeat. At Land O’Lakes, we’re tapping into why we exist, which is for our farm owners, their families, and their communities, and how do we help support them?
We’ve done a number of things over the years, including our CEO working to advocate for rural broadband in rural America. 42 million Americans at the time did not have access to the internet, which became really acute during COVID. We had kids going to Walmart parking lots to get Wi-Fi to do homework, which is just not right.
There’s a huge disconnect between how rural America shows up in culture, and our lived experience. We developed a platform called the Modern Rural Collective, a model for brands and people in film and entertainment and media and other organizations to come together to shift that narrative.
That idea of Rooted in Tomorrow, where we came from, where we want to go, and advocating for rural America just feels right to us. If you have to have a long explanation behind why you’re doing something, that’s probably a big warning sign.
At the same time, CMOs are expected to continually innovate and continually find new areas of growth, opportunity, visibility. So how do you balance that?
We’re going through some of this right now. We’re trying to get the company to think differently about how we launch products. We don’t have the biggest budgets in the world. We’re a cooperative, so we need to make sure that every dollar really hits home, and that means standing out more than we’ve ever done before.
We’ve done quite a bit in the last few years to think about how we approach culture. How do we get into what’s happening with TikTok and other social media platforms? We did a collaboration with a sneaker company. Butter yellow is a trend. We’ve got some really fun stuff coming up next year as well.
It’s a very different way for us to go to market. A lot of questions internally arise, like, Why would we do that? But now that we have more data, we’re getting more permission.
What does it actually look like to build a culture-building capability into a company that wasn’t founded to think that way?
I did some of the similar work when I was at Harley. At Land O’Lakes, we’ve shifted the way that marketing is seen within the organization.
We have more of a seat at the table now than we did, and that’s in part because we’ve taken a lot more responsibility and accountability for what we create. We link everything that we do back to our business strategy.
The culture building shouldn’t end in the marketing department. It should be an organization-wide exercise.
With the Modern Rural Collective work that we’re doing, when we said we’re going to do a partnership with a production company in Hollywood, [people] were like, “Why the hell are we involved in that stuff for?”
But that is a culture shaper, right? The Netflix effect is real. If we want to change the way people think about rural America, then we have to go to the people who are shaping culture. In some ways, with Land O’Lakes, it is almost easier because everybody’s so committed to the farmers and realizes who we are and what we stand for, similar to Harley-Davidson, where our purpose was about fulfilling dreams of personal freedom.
How have you built enough trust internally?
This is a struggle that we definitely all have. Trust is built before the moment you need it.
I have a very tight relationship with our CFO, but also with our chief strategy officer or chief technology officer and our CEO. That’s important.
Building credibility for the marketing function around the data, showing that we have confidence, so when we need to ask for something that might seem odd or unexpected, people are like: “You’re going to take responsibility for the results, and you tried something before, and that worked.”
And transparency, too. One of the things we suffered a little bit with is we always wanted to tell a good story. We would never tell any bad steps. We were measuring everything, hundreds of things, and I realized it was in search of what the good story was, even though it didn’t work.
Being more transparent, having humility that in our group we don’t know all the answers, and being upfront about that, has helped in building those trusted relationships.
How do you measure the impact of contributing to culture?
You’ve got to speak the language of business. It’s very easy to get caught up in marketing jargon all the time—talking about what we’re trying to achieve, what’s the insight behind it, what’s the strategy.
It’s not just that we’re jumping on a trend on TikTok. There’s actually a strategy behind it.
With the Modern Rural Collective work, that’s a long game. That requires a lot of learning along the way to say we’re going to measure success through adoption.
What’s a cultural conversation you believe brands aren’t paying enough attention to yet?
[People in rural communities] are an underappreciated audience. They tend to get romanticized and idealized when they are shown as isolated or in decline. There’s a ton of innovation and entrepreneurship and creativity in these communities. We actually hire a lot of people in these rural communities, [including] people on my team who bring that perspective to our work.
It’s about helping talent stay in those hometowns because a lot of people want to stay closer to family these days, especially the younger generation. We want investment in these communities too. We want people to have prosperity and growth opportunities.
For marketers trying to shift their organization from telling stories to shaping culture, what’s one small concrete first step that you would suggest they take this quarter?
Don’t be scared to involve other colleagues from different parts of the organization. That’s been super valuable for me because then I have advocates all over the place, and I call on them when I need them.
What’s your bike of choice when you ride?
I’m fortunate to have a few. This is a hobby of mine. Other people have shoes. I have motorcycles. The Road Glide is my favorite, which is one of the big touring bikes. We’re actually going [soon] to Moab and Pikes Peak in Colorado and Taos, Santa Fe, and Four Corners.
What’s your favorite ride?
You see so much of this country from two wheels, more than you would see in a car. Georgia is one of my favorite places to ride because there’s so many great small towns here. We stopped at a gas station and we asked this lady, “Is there somewhere we can just grab lunch, like a buffet lunch or something?” And she said, “Yeah, there’s a place up the road just called the Coleman House.” And it literally looked like somebody’s house, and we’re like, “We’re not sure. Should we walk in here?”
We walked in, and there was this long table of food, and it was 10 bucks for all-you-can-eat lunch. And I swear it was this lady’s house. We met all these amazing people and it was incredible.
