The Effective CMO: Land O'Lakes' Heather Malenshek

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Work Podcast. I'm Annemarie Kerwin, America's editor and today we have a new episode of the Effective CMO where we interview marketing leaders at some of the world's most interesting brands to learn more about their approach to effectiveness. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Heather Malenchek, SVP and student Chief Marketing Officer at Land O lakes. Heather oversees B2C and B2B marketing strategy for the Farmer Owned Cooperative and was previously recognized by Forbes as one of the world's most influential CMOs during her time at Harley Davidson. Today, she is here to discuss how Land O' Lakes is working to change the cultural narrative around rural America and building marketer led cultural platforms.

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Speaker A: Heather, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Yeah, thank you for having me. Nice to meet you.

Speaker A: It's nice to meet you. Um, so I'd like to start with a question that we ask all our fellow CMOs who have joined us on this series. What's your philosophy of marketing effectiveness and what does that mean to you in your role at Land O Lakes?

Speaker C: Yeah, so great question. I think really important in my role as a cmo, whatever, uh, business I've been working in. But for me it's a mixture of, and a balance of both creating meaningful business impact, which is really important for the work that we do, but also, I believe, creating cultural impact over the long term. So not just short term metrics. And as an industry, uh, we've swung the pendulum really far into what we're called performance marketing, which is always a bit of a misnomer for me because everything should perform at some way shape or form. But it's become much more about that. And I think really everything starts with clarifying what your brand is, the brand purpose, and then using that as a foundation. We've anchored ourselves in, um, an enterprise wide purpose. So we have three business divisions within Land o'. Lakes. We have our dairy foods division we have our agricultural division, we have an animal nutrition division, and we have an enterprise wide purpose of rooted in tomorrow which is really focused on supporting the prosperity of our farmers for many years to come. So generational value that we're trying to build over time and then the communities that they live in and they work in serve really is foundational to our business. So effectiveness also means for us, uh, strengthening the trust, the relevance, the connection with those communities while also driving commercial growth. So it's a bit of a bigger answer to the question I think than maybe other companies have.

Speaker A: But yeah, that is a, um, big mandate when you're thinking about, um, everything that goes into keeping farmers going.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, well, let's widen the scope just a little bit because I also want to just get uh, your thoughts on how you see things going for the industry. Are there big geopolitical, macroeconomic or consumer issues that you're particularly worried about for the next year and might have an impact on you or all of marketing coming up?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the biggest issues, and in the course of doing some of this work, I know we're going to talk a bit more about one of the biggest issues that I see is um, a growing division and distrust across communities and lived experiences. So I think it was the Edelman Trust Barometer that came out fairly recently that talked about the importance of trust and how 7 in 10 this data blew me away. 7 in 10 consumers are unwilling or hesitant to trust people who have different values or lived experiences than they do or. But at the same time they understand that those sort of cross cultural conversations are really important in building trust. So we're come to this point where we're on the one hand hesitant to trust, but know that if we don't talk and have those conversations, that's important. So I think that really matters for us in the market. Well, it matters for us in general, but it matters for us in the marketing space because I think brands increasingly have a role in helping people feel seen and understood and connected. So representation and storytelling isn't a secondary consideration anymore. It influences perception, it influences trust, um, and ultimately business outcomes as a result of that. So it's um, I think we're gonna, I mean, I think economic uncertainty is just the new normal, unfortunately. Um, you know, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a tough environment to work with, but I think we have to look at navigating uh, economic uncertainty but also balancing long term brand investment, which I think is really important. To make sure that we do that so that brands really stay grounded in their purpose, their values and they build resilience over time.

Speaker A: So yeah, that's interesting that you brought up trust, uh, as being such a issue in the cross cultural conversations that aren't happening because uh, you've built something that you're hoping will bridge some of that divide in the modern rural collective. Can you tell us about how you came to start that work? Yeah.

Speaker C: And so I always start by giving credit to our CEO Beth Ford on this because if anybody's met Beth, she's a bit of a force of nature and she's very deeply passionate about uh, our cooperative, our member owners and their families. And so just before COVID hit, she had realized that there was about 42 million Americans did not have access to the Internet and many of those were living in rural communities. And so she set about trying to change that. So she convened a group of about 150 companies, big brands, lots of brands you have heard of, to put pressure on the administration to put funding in the infrastructure bill to make that broadband Internet happen. And uh, was successful. So you know, it's an ongoing process to get everything, to uh, get everybody access. But when you think about, especially during COVID when we were all at home zooming and on teams doing uh, doing things and kids were on online doing their homework, some of these kids in these rural communities were literally being driven to a Walmart parking lot to do their homework, which should not be. I mean Internet access is as important as electrification these days. So, so I was in awe of that work and wondered as a marketing industry what we might be able to do. And so we're very intimately involved with these rural communities every day through our member owners. And what we were seeing in the lived experiences that we had, uh, just wasn't showing up in culture. And so really the mission behind this work is to reframe the narrative around, ah, farmers and the communities that they live in and remind people that these communities are often under recognized, they're undervalued for sure and underappreciated and they feed the world. So it's kind of important. Um, these are really at the heart of everything that we do as a member owned cooperative and the foundation of that. And 87% of our domestic food supply comes from these communities. And yet again not reflected in culture at all and certainly not appreciated that way. So knowing that as marketers I think we have an opportunity but also a responsibility to shape culture and create culture, um, that led us to Launch what we call the Modern World Collective, which similar, uh, to what Beth was doing with the American Connection Project is we wanted to convene some partners to come and join with us to help change, uh, this narrative. And so we're working across brand storytellers, film, TV industry, uh, working in the music industry as well, uh, to really help reframe rural as a source of talent, as a source of solutions, innovation, creativity, all of those things. So it's exciting. We launched it late 24 and uh, we're gaining a ton of momentum with it, which is really awesome.

Speaker A: That's amazing. So you recent. One of the companies you partnered with was Getty to launch Re Picturing Rural, which was, uh, a way to get better stock imagery around what rural life really looks like. Right. So what did your, how was that received when and how is that going, those efforts?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's been going great. So we thought, we tried to think about it as we were going to get a group of brands together and we're doing that now. But it was also, how do we get some impact at scale really fast? And Getty have been amazing partners with this. But we had a, we had a hypothesis that the biggest, largest repository of imagery that's used by media and brands probably wasn't representing rural in the right way. Uh, and they have a great research process called VisualGPS, where they go into their repository and they do the analysis. And uh, fortunately or unfortunately, probably unfortunately, it actually validated our hypothesis. Only 5% of visuals were actually set in rural places and 16% of them include people. Most of the time it's just empty landscapes and there are beautiful places out there. But really rural wasn't showing up. Uh, women don't work in rural America, according to where it was at the time, when actually they're the backbone of many of these communities and the farms. Um, young adults were never seen with technology. They were always seen with family or on their own. And very deep contrast to what we looked at with urban Gen Z, for example. So lots of really interesting data that said we have to go to work on this. So we worked with Getty to produce some, uh, briefs to identify. We identified the gaps and then produced these briefs for them to go out and curate. Basically a collection of imagery that was much more authentic to what was actually happening in rural. Um, and that toolkit, including all of that research and those images are available to people to download, we didn't keep it for us. We wanted to make this available to anybody and everybody who can use them because by doing that, we'll shift that visual narrative of rural, which is, which is really important. And I think it's not. There's no. I was talking about this the other day with someone. I don't think there's any bad actors here. I think it's just the stereotypes that are there persist because the creative industries have historically relied on outdated visual shorthands and that's what they've had available. And um, I think that's why our partnership with Getty is so important. And they've been just tremendous partners with us. And this is the first of a couple of tools that we have out now that are tangible tools that people can use. And um, I think people are really happy to see that happen. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, and when you think about it, the, the centers of media aren't really located in Iowa. Right. They're very urban, usually.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: It wouldn't, it might not be something that people would even realize they're overlooking because it's not their lived experience. Yeah. To that end, you've also collaborated with Imagine Entertainment to launch a toolkit for screenwriters and producers. What can other marketers learn from directly engaging with Hollywood and uh, the entertainment industry to help shape culture and TV portrayals?

Speaker C: Yeah, and this is a really interesting one because, um, we were very fortunate to meet the folks from Imagine almost by chance, uh, a couple years ago and uh, kept the conversation going. And Imagine is the partnership of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Ron Howard actually grew up next to his grandfather's farm, so he's a farm kid and really understands this space and really has a deep passion to try and change the written narrative too and do the right thing. So, um, there was a real sort of shared mission, if you will, when we met with them, which was fantastic. And um, we know that storytellers, especially in film and tv, have a major influence on how communities are perceived. So we wanted to work with them on how do we create a toolkit for screenwriters and producers not to tell them what stories to tell, to tell or write, but just so that they could start to challenge some of those assumptions that they normally have and question things and get curious about rural America and learn about some of the nuances there. And I think our combined power, I would say, of us being based in rural America and a farmer owned co op and their very established presence in the entertainment business, um, has really come together with this toolkit. Uh, and I think we're going to help reflect a much more dynamic view of what rural American life really is. And that toolkit we put together, actually they pulled some of the Getty Image research in too, because it was super powerful. And then also there's perspectives there from rural residents, so including some of our member owners. Because the last thing we want to do is talk about rural America without actually talking with them. So we pulled that into the mix. Um, and it's real practical guidance, I think, for representing rural life and with much more, uh, credibility and much more nuanced, which is good. And it's been very well received. We actually launched it at Sundance Film Festival this year. Um, and we had a panel with our partners from Imagine and someone from UTA Heartland that was on there too. And, um, we were oversold. And it was so much interest in doing the right thing here. So that's where we know we've hit an important nerve here. I think that people want to learn about, and I think this is, this is how culture is shaped, if you think about it. So if you want to create long term perception change, you have to engage the industries and the creators who can influence that storytelling at scale. And we think we have that with Imagine.

Speaker A: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. Um, have you also worked with the creator community at all?

Speaker C: Yeah. So, uh, we're working on a few things right now that will involve more the creators that are actually in rural communities as well. Um, and there's a lot of them. Right. And actually many of them are doing pretty well online right now. So, um, but that's part of the mix too, for the. Actually the next stage of our work with Imagine is going to be in rural communities with some of these creators, so that we can sort of have a meeting of the minds.

Speaker A: Oh, that's great.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you noted, uh, that the goal of this initiative wasn't necessarily to just sell more butter, but it was really to figure out how to make a cultural impact. So how do you measure the return on investment for cultural representation campaigns? And how does that, does that create a halo effect for Land O Lakes?

Speaker C: Yeah, and I think, um, you know, as you said, it's not. We're not really measuring this by short term sales. We're measuring it by cultural change and influence, which will happen over the longer term. But we see the success of this. We see is if these communities start to see themselves reflected with accuracy and pride and when brands and creators stop defaulting to the stereotypes and shortcuts, um, and when our stories start to appear more naturally across media, entertainment and marketing. And again, that will take some time. Um, but we're also Looking at shorter term, we're looking at the adoption of the tools that we've built, the depths of the partnerships that following and the momentum that we're seeing there. And then from a business standpoint, the value really comes from investing uh, upstream in culture. And as I said, those rural communities are at the heart of everything that we do. So ensuring that they are seen and valued in the right way, um, and how we shift that narrative is really foundational to our long term business performance. So that's how we think about kind of the roi. And um, we're really pleased to see, as I said, the interest, um, the engagement with the tools that we've built and honestly the ideas that are coming at us about things we could do that we are a small mighty team and we're trying to pull partners in to help. But people are really interested in making a difference here and uh, that's really, it's really terrific to see.

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Speaker A: So in your role you handle both B2C and B2B which I guess is very important when you're working with a cooperative. So um, I know in B2B brand is often kind of a hard sell. Brand building is a hard sell. So I'm curious how, how have you found your dual role like the brand building work? How does it help with the B2B side of the business for you?

Speaker C: Yeah, and brand is important in B2B too. Um, so I think sometimes it's a bit of a misnomer. M. I've done work with the ANA where we talked about brands for brands for humans which you know, business customers are humans too. So sometimes we forget about that. Um, but, but both are important and I think for us, you know, we have amazing iconic brands within our portfolio. So we have the, the Land O Lakes Dairy foods brand. We have Purina in the animal nutrition space. Um, we have Croplan, which is one of our big uh, seed brands in the agricultural space. So we have iconic brands. You know, we have strong brand health in all of them. And so we try and balance that the two where we're driving performance in the short term, but we're also making sure that we're taking care of the brand over the long term. And I think, um, if we think about the modern RO Collective side of things, we are also tracking what would be considered traditional marketing metrics here and engagement signals. Um, so first two months of our campaign with Getty, uh, we had over, I think 450,000 image downloads. I think we're close to a million now, which is phenomenal. Um, it's driven over a hundred million impressions. It's outperformed benchmarks by about 10 times. And uh, in many cases we've had paid to earned impression, um, of generating, uh, about 34 times, uh, earned to paid impressions in the first month of the campaign that we have, which on average their benchmark is about two and a half times. So we're, we're doing really well on some of the traditional marketing metrics with the modern roll collective as well. And I think the other piece of this is we're building influence so our brand is out there. It's just really interesting because people are like, oh, Land O Lakes. Then they want to know more about who we are. Because honestly, and, uh, we heard this and when we were at Sundance, people were actually saying, oh, did you hear what Land O' Lakes is doing? And they're like, land o' Lakes, isn't that the butter company? Then we get an opportunity to actually tell people who we are and what we do. So there are benefits to building influence at a sort of a more macro level than, um, just an individual business unit level. So we really believe here we're building emotional connection and trust and relevance over time.

Speaker A: So, uh, earlier you were talking about economic uncertainty being sort of ever present with us. And, uh, I know a lot of companies are under a lot of pressure to just perform and drive growth. So within your organization, how do you deal with that pressure between balancing the long term? It sounds like you have great brand tracking that you're doing, but how do you balance that with that pressure to like, have that short term, uh, impact?

Speaker C: Yeah, and I think, I mean, it's helping, it's helping people understand the value of brands. So, you know, on the one hand, if we're. By the way, I believe everything needs to build the brand at some point. Every touch point has to build the brand, um, pure brand building work. I'm not sure if there's anything we do that's pure brand building work because there's Always some business connection to that. But that gives us the strength of our brands, also gives us the opportunity to price at premium when um, especially in some of the commodity markets, brand becomes very, very important to people like what you stand for, who you are. Um, so that's very important. So some education I think at the business level around that. But then also being accountable for those short term sales metrics too. We have to do both, um, but what we don't want to do is only rely on those. And as said, I think as an industry we have um, over indexed on short term performance metrics which ah, at the expense of brand, um, which a lot of companies now are realizing there's a need to rebalance because if you don't have brand strength that uh, can really impact those short term sales too.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I love what you said about uh, maintain pricing which is a big point we like to make here at work. Why brand is important. You can uphold pricing. Yeah. So looking ahead at industry disruption, what areas do you see? AI, uh, playing a greater role for your company and also the world that you have to operate in. How are you accounting for AI effects?

Speaker C: Yeah, we have to talk about AI. Always have to talk about AI.

Speaker A: It's 2026, we've got to talk about it.

Speaker C: Exactly. Um, it's actually, I mean there's, it's interesting. I was reflecting on this the other week about the changes in search. Right. So as we think about the work we're doing in the search environment and we're, you know, we think we do pretty well there now we have to think about how we show up with any. So the team is um, busy at work there. I think it's going to continue uh, to shape how we create content, how we personalize content, how we scale that content. It's also giving us tremendous potential to uncover uh, insights and identify gaps in representation. If we think about the rural America stuff more quickly, um, I would have been thrilled and I've talked to some folks on my team who are starting their career. I was like, I would have been thrilled to have this thing if I was, if I was just starting out. It makes me so much smarter in many cases. The thing that's interesting though, and I think one of the biggest challenges, especially related to what I'm just talking about with rural representation, is we have to make sure that the AI systems don't reinforce the same stereotypes and biases that are already existing in culture and media. Because if that underlying data that comes through lacks any kind of nuance Then we can unintentionally, through AI, amplify those narratives. So, um, that's one reason we think this work around representation matters. So much so that when we make sure that as we're increasingly relying on AI generated content and creative tools, that the source material, um, becomes true and authentic and the storytelling actually does reflect that richness and complexity of rural communities. And that's something that we have done some work on so far and just in terms of feeding and educating the language models, large language models around it. And we'll continue to do that in our day to day. We are, um, embedding AI and everything from the personalization side of things, the search side of things, to how we drive efficiency. I'm not a big believer in AI taking over creativity because I think you need the human component. So I think it's an and not an or. It's like a superpower in many cases. So we're happy to have it and pleased to be using it. Uh, and lots of things happening in the ag industry with AI that is super exciting. So much more technology and agriculture than I grew up next to my uncle's farm and there wasn't a lot of technology these days. It's incredible, uh, the amount of technology that's involved. So AI is an exciting thing for us. A big opportunity, some challenges and watch outs that we have. But um, you know, really I think for marketers it's going to be a bit of a superpower.

Speaker A: So just to wrap things up, what's next for you at Land O' Lakes? What are you working on for the next year?

Speaker C: Uh, we have, so we have a few really exciting things happening on our brand. So our Purina Animal Nutrition, uh, we've done some, I think some really spectacular work and sort of relaunching that brand, um, starting actually in a couple of weeks and um, really bringing to life the uh, the animal owner who is our, our audience and how animal ownership and taking care of animals, especially horses and chickens and other things, what they do to enrich your life. So that work is really exciting. That's going to hit pretty soon. We got some brand work happening on the B2B side on our seed brand Cropland, that is also very exciting. And you know, we are approaching that uh, brand as we would a B2C brand. As I said, it's at the end of the day the customers for that work are still human beings. So we're working through that. And then on the modern rural collective, some more exciting work happening with Imagine as we Think about how we now take. We've got the toolkit. People are downloading it now. We actually want to connect with the writers, um, and have conversations with them in rural communities, actually, um, get them into the experience, uh, connect them with rural writers and actually start to have these conversations live. So we're going to be doing some of that, uh, coming up later this year, beginning of next year. And then lastly, uh, we have a really exciting innovation challenge that we're going to be launching with, uh, uh, an organization called Revit, which is a wonderful nonprofit and they work with kids to do micro funding for, uh, innovation ideas. And this is specifically for, uh, rural youth, which I'm really excited about. It's the first time they've done it just focused on rural. And we're really excited to see what's going to come out of that.

Speaker A: Wow, that sounds terrific. Thanks so much. Well, uh, that's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for joining us. It was so nice to meet you, Heather.

Speaker C: Lovely to meet you, too. Thank you for asking.

Speaker A: So if you've enjoyed this episode and want to catch all of our effective CMO interviews and then be sure to follow us and subscribe on your Facebook favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.