We believe a corporate website is so much more than a place to store compliance and financial documents; it’s how unique and essential audiences – talent, customers, consumers, policymakers, influencers and beyond – are introduced to our enterprise Land O’Lakes, Inc. brand, whether that’s through the website itself or filtered through AI, social media and other aggregators.
To many, Land O’Lakes is a legendary dairy company with a presence in so many Americans’ refrigerators. But our story extends well beyond our incredible dairy products: We’re a 103-year-old, farmer-owned cooperative that touches nearly the entire food value chain. From leading on-farm insights, products and services to consumer products and global brand recognition, our enterprise is helping move agriculture into the future, supporting rural communities and tackling some of the most important issues facing our food system.
With these layers in mind, we kept four specific and essential goals in the crosshairs:
Our priority was building not just a website, but a modern platform to share our purpose-driven story that delivered a meaningful and useful experience for visitors, without feeling too dense. It needed to speak plainly about the incredible forces driving our century-old company forward, and to articulate the relentless innovation and big-picture thinking that achieves it. In a company as complex as ours, this was a tall order.
This fact was reflected in our old website, which was less a distinctive voice powering our company’s brand and operated more as a collection of facts about our enterprise. Sections or features would be “bolted on” to meet internal needs – at the expense of an intentional experience for the audiences we needed to engage. Over time, it grew unfocused. Designed a decade ago in 2015 – around the time when the iPhone 5 was released – it nonetheless held its own for many years thanks to a smart and utilitarian visual design, which turned out to be an element we made sure our future website work would carry over.
The acceleration of digital expectations ushered in with the COVID-era also motivated us to think about what came next, but challenges were extensive. We had a limited budget, limited timeline due to those restraints, and an enterprise that still thought of itself as the aforementioned pieces of a whole, rather than a distinct, unified brand.
To execute, we had to build belief and a culture around the work itself. We established a very lean, fully internal team at Land O’Lakes (with no agency support or consultants) that spanned communications, brand marketing, design/creative, IT and executive leadership. Trust between these teams, the proper translation of key outcomes across these very different (but critical) disciplines was nurtured deliberately – it was the best way to build belief internally in the work. That belief, from senior leadership through to brand and business owners, was essential to our success.
Our project was brought to life after more than a year of positioning, months of planning and a 10-week development sprint which required incredible amounts of coordination and agility. This was not a naturally occurring muscle in an enterprise with very diverse businesses and expectations – but building a culture around the work fueled the execution. Everyone was pointed toward the same North Star.
Critically, we designed this experience from the smallest devices, up – recognizing that this site would likely be started – and in many cases fully experienced – on phones and tablets. Our brand and story needed to be expressed visually as much as it was in our words, so great care was taken to identify authentic photos that came from our own shoots. Because there was an all-internal marriage of visual, multimedia and written storytelling, our story shone through the design in a deeply organic way.
This website delivered on every one of our desired outcomes in terms of how its visitors experienced our brand’s story through the platform.
Simplicity in both the story and the design did not come at the expense of a rich experience, regardless of the device the visitor was using. And while the new website has only been live for two months at the time of this submission, we’re seeing statistically significant increases in conversations with job seekers; more time spent in our feature stories; and an increase in pages visited when learning about our various businesses.
But it’s what the project itself proved to internal partners that may end up being just as valuable as the in-market results. Achieved with a fully internal team and an incredibly modest development budget, the work was celebrated and elevated as an example of what we can do within our four walls. Similarly, the Land O’Lakes, Inc. enterprise story itself looks and feels so authentic because it came directly from our own people. This work developed pride in our story, and it’s felt through the website itself.
