DANA POINT, CA: Land O’Lakes, the food and agriculture company, is leveraging the power of purpose to strengthen its brands and provide a unified vision across diverse business units.

Tim Scott, SVP/CMO of Land O’Lakes discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Brand Masters conference.

“People don’t really know much about us. They think of us as the brand that their mothers used – as good butter on Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he said. (For more, read WARC's report: Land O'Lakes moves beyond butter to purpose-focused food mission.)

In reality, the firm operates in a wide range of categories, from dairy foods and animal feed through to biofuels and satellite imaging, yielding what Scott described as a “farm-to-fork view of agriculture”.

What unites these various divisions? “We are creating solutions each and every day to solve the global food crisis,” Scott told the ANA assembly.

In this context, putting that purpose at the heart of its thinking is an invaluable approach. “Having that purpose to drive a business is really the name of the game,” Scott said.

“Purposeful marketing clearly is the way to the future. Fifty, sixty, or 70 percent of the brands that aren’t gravitating to a very strong purpose simply won’t exist in ten years.”

To translate purpose into action, Land O’Lakes must truly understand its core customers – as exemplified by research with farmers, which has fed through to more relevant messaging for its WinField United seed and crop protection arm.

“You know, we had seen years and years and years of farmers hugging farmers, holding hands, or handshaking in the field, or caressing their corn plants. That’s just not the reality,” Scott said.

“Feeding Human Progress” is the marketing umbrella that covers the full gamut of Land O’Lakes farming initiatives, as it reflects an emphasis on the problems it solves, the motivation for its employees and its emphasis on technology.

“What’s interesting about these three words is you can end each one of them with a period and they will tell you exactly what we’re doing,” Scott said.

Sourced from WARC