By Tom Whitfield

Land O'Lakes feeds about 100 million animals a day — and butter is the smallest piece of the company. "Even though you know us for our dairy products and our butter and cheese, it's the smallest part of our business," CMO Heather Malenshek said on stage at Marketing Vanguard's invite-only session during ADWEEK's September Brandweek event. "We feed about 100 million animals a day. We feed zoo animals."

Malenshek joined Land O'Lakes six years ago after six and a half years as CMO at Harley-Davidson, where she was the first woman in the role and one of only two CMOs in the company's history. Her agency-side résumé includes Jeep and Budweiser. She also worked on Bud Light — "just like working with a frat party every day," she said.

The co-op turns 106 this era of its history, and that longevity bred silos. Malenshek found three distinct businesses with different audiences and different goals when she arrived. The unifier: a commitment to farmers shared across the enterprise.

How does a co-op build one brand story?

Malenshek talked to people across the organization, including plant and manufacturing workers, to dig out the company's stories. A cross-functional team — operations, finance, supply chain, marketing — built a platform called Rooted in Tomorrow.

"Our farmers are always evolving because they have to, and so we need to do the same thing," she said.

The platform now anchors Land O'Lakes' cultural advocacy, including CEO Beth Ford's push for rural broadband. At the time, 42 million Americans lacked internet access — a gap that turned acute during COVID, when children went to Walmart parking lots for Wi-Fi to do homework. "Which is just not right," Malenshek said.

Where is the line on cultural participation?

The test is simple, according to Malenshek: it must be core to the people and communities the brand serves. "If it isn't, they will sniff it out in a heartbeat," she said.

That logic produced the Modern Rural Collective, a model for brands and entertainment and media organizations to shift how rural America appears in culture. "There's a huge disconnect between how rural America shows up in culture, and our lived experience," she said.

Her warning sign for overreach is equally blunt: if you need a long explanation for why you're doing something, stop.

The co-op has no big budgets to waste. Every dollar must hit home, which means standing out more than ever. Recent moves include a collaboration with a sneaker company, riding the butter-yellow trend, and more launches planned for next year. Internal skeptics asked why. "But now that we have more data, we're getting more permission," Malenshek said.

How do you win internal trust?

Trust is built before the moment you need it, she argued. Malenshek keeps tight relationships with the CFO, the chief strategy officer, the chief technology officer and the CEO.

Credibility comes from data and from owning results — so that odd requests get approved. Transparency helped too. Her team once measured hundreds of metrics in search of a good story even when work failed. Admitting what the team doesn't know built stronger relationships, she said.

The Hollywood partnership under the Modern Rural Collective drew internal pushback — people asked, "Why the hell are we involved in that stuff for?" Malenshek's answer: "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."

What should marketers do this quarter?

Her concrete first step for shifting from storytelling to culture-shaping: involve colleagues from across the organization. "That's been super valuable for me because then I have advocates all over the place, and I call on them when I need them."

She measures culture work in business language, not marketing jargon, and treats the Modern Rural Collective as a long game judged by adoption. Rural communities, she added, remain an underappreciated audience — romanticized as isolated or in decline, when they hold significant innovation and entrepreneurship. That is the audience Land O'Lakes intends to keep investing in, one cultural bet at a time.