ADWEEK: What’s a moment, maybe even a mistake, that taught you where the line sits between genuine cultural participation and a brand overreach?
HEATHER MALENSHEK: 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.
Innovating on a Cooperative Budget
Unlike many consumer-packaged goods (CPG) giants, Land O’Lakes operates as a cooperative, meaning every marketing dollar spent is essentially coming out of the pockets of its farmer-owners. This creates a high level of accountability and requires a strategy that maximizes impact without massive budgets.
Malenshek has pushed the company to experiment with newer platforms like TikTok and social media trends, such as the recent "butter yellow" fashion movement. They even ventured into a collaboration with a sneaker company to tap into lifestyle trends. While these moves initially sparked internal skepticism, Malenshek used data to prove their efficacy, earning "permission" to continue innovating.
ADWEEK: 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?
HEATHER MALENSHEK: 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.
Building a Culture-Shaping Capability
The shift from a traditional marketing department to a culture-shaping entity requires more than just creative campaigns; it requires a seat at the executive table. Malenshek emphasized that marketing must link its activities directly to business strategy to maintain credibility. When Land O’Lakes partnered with a Hollywood production company to influence how rural stories are told on screen, she had to answer tough questions about why a dairy cooperative was involved in the entertainment industry.
“The Netflix effect is real,” she explained. “If we want to change the way people think about rural America, then we have to go to the people who are shaping culture.”
ADWEEK: What does it actually look like to build a culture-building capability into a company that wasn’t founded to think that way?
HEATHER MALENSHEK: 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.
The Power of Transparency and Trust
For Malenshek, the key to internal buy-in is trust, which she believes must be built long before it is needed. This involves fostering tight relationships with the CFO, CTO, and Chief Strategy Officer. It also requires a level of humility and transparency that is sometimes rare in corporate leadership.
She admitted that the organization previously struggled with a desire to only tell "good stories," often burying data that showed when a strategy had failed. By being upfront about mistakes and measuring success through the "language of business" rather than marketing jargon, her team has built a foundation of credibility that allows for more adventurous creative risks.
