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.
