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.
