When the average consumer walks down the dairy aisle, the Land O’Lakes name is synonymous with a single, reliable staple: butter. For more than a century, the brand has occupied a permanent spot in American refrigerators, built on a reputation of quality and tradition. However, to view Land O’Lakes strictly as a dairy company is to miss the vast majority of its operations. As a member-owned cooperative, the organization’s footprint spans the entirety of the agricultural ecosystem, from data-driven crop protection technologies to a massive animal nutrition division that impacts global food chains.
The challenge for the brand is bridging the gap between that cozy, kitchen-table perception and its reality as a complex, multi-billion-dollar agricultural powerhouse. This was the central theme of a recent discussion at Marketing Vanguard’s invite-only session during ADWEEK’s Brandweek event in September. Heather Malenshek, the Chief Marketing Officer of Land O’Lakes, sat down with ADWEEK’s Chief Brand and Community Officer, Jenny Rooney, to pull back the curtain on how a legacy cooperative navigates the modern cultural landscape.
“Even though you know us for our dairy products and our butter and cheese, it’s the smallest part of our business,” Malenshek told the audience. To illustrate the scale of the company’s less visible operations, she shared a staggering statistic: “We feed about 100 million animals a day. We feed zoo animals.”
This expansiveness is both Land O’Lakes’ greatest strength and its most significant marketing hurdle. Finding a cohesive, authentic way to represent such diverse interests—ranging from high-tech farming solutions to retail butter—requires a delicate balance, particularly when a brand seeks to participate in broader cultural conversations without appearing out of touch.
A Career Defined by Iconic Legacies
Malenshek’s ability to manage this complexity stems from a career spent at the helm of some of the world’s most recognizable and fiercely protected brands. Before joining Land O’Lakes, she served as the CMO of Harley-Davidson for over six years, where she broke barriers as the first woman to hold the position. Her resume also includes stints working on the Jeep brand, Budweiser, and a long tenure with Bud Light.
Reflecting on her time in the beverage industry, she joked about the high-energy, often chaotic nature of managing a brand like Bud Light, comparing it to “working with a frat party every day.” However, it was her experience at Harley-Davidson—a brand where she is a “rider at heart”—that perhaps best prepared her for the cultural nuances of Land O’Lakes. Both brands share a base of deeply loyal stakeholders who view the company not just as a business, but as a core part of their identity and livelihood.
When she first considered joining Land O’Lakes, Malenshek admitted she was largely unaware of the brand’s true scope. It was a meeting with CEO Beth Ford that changed her perspective. “I fell in love with her immediately—her leadership and how she cares so deeply about what we do,” Malenshek recalled. That connection to the mission became the catalyst for a total transformation of how the cooperative presents itself to the world.
Breaking Down Silos Through Shared Purpose
One of the primary obstacles Malenshek faced upon her arrival six years ago was the fragmented nature of the organization. With three distinct business units serving different audiences with varying goals, the company felt siloed. In a 106-year-old institution, “the way it’s always been done” can become a formidable barrier to innovation.
To find the brand’s authentic core, Malenshek embarked on a listening tour, speaking with employees across the organization, from corporate headquarters to the workers in manufacturing facilities and plants. The goal was to find a unifying narrative that could support the entire enterprise. The result of this cross-functional collaboration was the development of a new brand platform: "Rooted in Tomorrow."
“That was done with operations people, with finance people, supply chain, marketing on top of that,” Malenshek explained. The platform acknowledges that while the cooperative is grounded in a century of history, its farmer-owners are constantly evolving out of necessity. By aligning the marketing strategy with the lived reality of the farmers, the brand found a way to move forward without losing its soul.
ADWEEK: 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?
HEATHER MALENSHEK: 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.
Advocating for Rural America
For Land O’Lakes, authentic cultural participation isn’t about jumping on every trending hashtag; it’s about addressing the real-world issues facing its members. Malenshek pointed to the company’s advocacy for rural broadband as a prime example of brand-led social impact that remains core to the business mission.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital divide became a crisis for rural communities. With 42 million Americans lacking reliable internet access at the time, the cooperative saw children forced to sit in retail parking lots just to access Wi-Fi for their schoolwork. Land O’Lakes, led by CEO Beth Ford, stepped in to advocate for infrastructure investment, recognizing that high-speed internet is no longer a luxury but a requirement for modern agriculture and rural survival.
This advocacy birthed the "Modern Rural Collective," a collaborative model designed to shift the cultural narrative surrounding rural America. Malenshek noted a significant disconnect between how rural life is portrayed in media—often romanticized or shown in a state of decline—and the actual innovation and entrepreneurship she sees daily.
