Land O’Lakes, Inc., best known for its iconic butter brand, is one of the nation’s largest cooperatives, owned by individual dairy farmers and agricultural retailers. Land O’Lakes today has a unique farmer-to-fork view of the food and agriculture businesses. But today’s changing consumer landscape has brought about new challenges and opportunities for the household brand.
Operating across the United States and in more than 60 countries worldwide, Land O’Lakes has a broad and diverse audience to reach. They realized they needed to embark on a transformation to support modern consumer habits and differentiate themselves from the competition to be successful in a changing market.
To do this, Land O’Lakes had to evolve their marketing technology and, in turn, the story they told to the world. They wanted to combine the magic of data and intelligent analysis to tell a story that would resonate with their audience and its values.
The challenge: disconnected data and siloed teams
The first step is to identify the problem. Land O’Lakes knew they would need to ask some tough questions to get to the heart of the challenges they faced. They asked:
- What’s the value of our marketing?
- Where should we invest next?
- Does data go into every decision?
- Can we measure exceptional customer experience?
The answers to these questions would guide them through the data transformation they needed and help them to identify key challenges, including a burdensome data management process.
Prior to the transformation, Land O’Lakes had limited visibility into its data and a small analytics team spending their time aggregating data. Overall, Land O’Lakes needed a better way to personalize their marketing efforts. But disconnected data and siloed systems made it impossible to map the customer journey across multiple touchpoints and get a full, 360º view of their customers. This disconnected data reverberated internally as well, where teams often worked in silos and stakeholders were on different pages.
The solution: how Land O’Lakes built a “modern marketecture”
To meet these challenges, Land O’Lakes started by unifying data — and subsequently, stakeholders — across a single source of truth. The company turned to Datorama, a Salesforce company, to harmonize its data. In turn, this gave Land O’Lakes a cross-channel view of leads, a complete view of ROI across marketing activities, and actionable data on customer behavior and engagement.
This 360° view into customers and campaigns gave the team real-time, automated insight into which messages resonated with their audience. The insights helped them make decisions about when to pivot or double-down on their strategy and messaging. By working with the same set of data across marketers, analysts, and agency partners, Land O’Lakes was able to achieve collaboration across teams to take the data-driven approach they needed to understand and reach their customers. Today, Land O’Lakes has a clear picture of how its marketing strategy impacts goals across the entire company.
The results: putting data into action
Through its partnership with Datorama, Land O’Lakes used intelligent data and insights to transform their brand strategy while remaining true to their values and delivering stories that resonated with their audience.
One example of the company’s culmination of efforts to better reach customers was the success of its “SHE-I-O” campaign. Land O’Lakes prides itself on feeding people, crops, and progress. They are a co-op composed of more than 3,600 “farmer-to-fork” member-owners — half of whom are dairy farmers. Land O’Lakes launched the “SHE-I-O” campaign in 2018 on Women’s Equality Day to celebrate co-op members and the fact that women make up approximately one-third of all U.S. farmers. The campaign featured female leaders in the Land O’Lakes co-op and the agricultural industry. The campaign resonated with the public and it showed with:
- More than 3.5 million YouTube views
- 27.7 million ad video views
- 100K engagements across the campaign
- 420 million earned impressions, with 75 million via social media
Overall, the campaign resulted in a 70% increase in word-of-mouth awareness and a 10-point improvement in purchase intent.
Land O’Lakes takes pride in its uniqueness and its mission to feed human progress, but changing the culture across a large-scale global business was not easy. After identifying the key data challenges they faced as an organization, the company partnered with Datorama to uproot its marketing technology strategy and boost the data IQ across their business.
Through one source of truth, the company harmonized its siloed data sources, implemented a measurement system across teams, and ultimately transformed its culture without compromising values and — just as importantly — the values of its customers.
To learn more about Datorama, a Salesforce company, visit Datorama.com or request a demo.
