5 Questions with Karen Kozak

Karen Kozak is a brand and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience across a broad range of industries.  Karen currently serves as Global Brand Director at Cargill, responsible for driving brand activation activities internally and externally around the world.  Most recently she implemented Cargill’s 150th Anniversary program across all businesses and geographies.

Karen will be speaking at MN AMA's event, Engaging Your Stakeholders through Effective Storytelling, on April 5.

We asked her five questions about storytelling for a large company with an international presence.

1. In 2015, Cargill celebrated its 150 year anniversary. The company took on a year-long storytelling campaign to share Cargill's brand promise. With such a long history, how did you decide which stories to highlight? 
   
   Great question. With 150 years, there are so many great stories we could tell, so it was a challenge to determine where do we even begin. We started by developing a strategic narrative to focus on the most consistent elements of our history that are aligned with Cargill’s purpose of nourishing the world, and our brand promise of helping others be more successful and thrive. We identified three strategic planks of market excellence, innovation, and nourishing people, and used those as a lens as we curated our stories. Each story had to meet at least one of those strategic planks. This helped us narrow down our curated selection to get to the final 150 showcased on our anniversary site:  www.cargill.com/150.
    
2. What channels did you focus on to share your story? Why did you pick those channels?
   
   We chose a mix of internal and external channels. They were selected based on which best reached our primary and secondary audiences. We used existing internal channels such as our corporate and country intranet sites, where anniversary stories and content were tailored to local businesses and audiences. To reach employees who do not use a Cargill computer or intranet as part of their job (i.e. production & field workers), we also produced a selection of the 150 stories printed on broadsheets, table tents, and foldout brochures in 22 languages. These were placed in office and plant lobbies, breakrooms, cafeterias, and distributed to employees to share our 150^th anniversary content with employees globally. We also created new external channels, including a dedicated 150^th website and mobile app, as well as leveraging both earned and paid media (print, radio, digital, social, out of home) to share our 150 stories with our stakeholders. 
    
3. Effective storytelling is time intensive. The 150 Years page on Cargill's website is very well done with a lot of content. When companies are concerned about the bottom line, how do you prove ROI with storytelling?
   
   It all starts with a clear set of objectives and specific quantifiable goals. We also developed a set of principles to ensure the tactics we developed and implemented met the goals. There were, of course, new ideas or other opportunities that arose late in the planning or during our 150^th program, but if they did not align to the objectives or wouldn’t help meet the goals, we passed. While it was very tempting to “do it all,” having a set of principles ensured we didn’t stray from our strategy and objectives, which helped us meet and exceed our goals. Our 150^th website is a good example – instead of trying to pack in too much content, we went with a simple design to make it easy to navigate 150 stories, and showcase additional content that came from our employees as they shared our stories throughout the course of our anniversary year.
    
4. Cargill is a company with a global presence. How did you choose which audiences to target with the 150 Years campaign?
   
   We have 9 stakeholder groups, and while all 9 were certainly a target, we focused on our employees as our primary target. Given the sheer size and structure of Cargill, it was critical that our 150,000 employees around the world are able to first understand and then share our stories to their families, friends, and associates – and feel engaged and understand how they are helping create our future stories. Our customers, suppliers, and partners were our secondary target – our 150^th was a great opportunity to demonstrate the many ways Cargill has and continues to help them be more successful. We then looked to those two target audiences to then carry and amplify the 150^th stories and message to our broader group of stakeholders and society. 
    
5. In your experience, which types of stories resonate the most with Cargill's audiences?
   
   Interestingly, we found stories about our history were the most shared. Stories that featured certain markets where we have a large community presence also did particularly well. It seems there was a genuine desire to know more about Cargill – perhaps because we are a privately-owned company and not a household name. We also found stories that featured individuals resonated well with online audiences – humanizing a B2B brand made the story more personal and shareable. 

Image courtesy of Cargill.