The branding of Landus

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

For painting contractors, word in December that West Central Cooperative and Farmers Cooperative were merging and would need to repaint their many silos and bins to represent a shared future as Landus Cooperative was about like being a defense contractor and learning the Air Force wants to build a new stealth bomber.

“As soon as the vote went through,” Landus Cooperative spokeswoman Alicia Clancy said, “the phones started ringing.”

Calls came from painters as far south as Texas.

Before the merger vote on Dec. 18, cooperative leadership had pitched their 7,000 members on the benefits of becoming one.

But long before area farmers start to reap the benefits, anyone capable of producing vinyl decals by the thousands and skilled enough to paint concrete grain silos is going to find themselves with a bumper crop of work.

“It took 85 years to put all those logos up,” Clancy said.

And now they all need to be replaced.

The herculean task of rebranding West Central and FC as Landus Cooperative could take a year and a half, said CEO Milan Kucerak, a Jefferson resident and the former president and CEO of West Central.

“It is a challenge,” Kucerak said recently, “particularly with silos. Your logo is 90 feet in the air.”

Kucerak won’t disclose how much the rebranding effort will cost, but it’s safe to assume.

A lot.

West Central and FC — two agriculture co-ops with decades-long histories in the area — branded themselves maybe too well.

“Both FC and West Central were known extremely well,” Kucerak said.

There are logos on seemingly anything and everything.

“We’re going to find those things for weeks and months,” Clancy said. “Some of the lawn mowers had logos on them.”

Landus Cooperative has ordered 4,312 vinyl logo decals for anhydrous ammonia tanks alone.

By law, the anhydrous tanks were supposed to be emblazoned with Landus logos by April 1, the date the new company officially started operating.

Yeah.

Didn’t happen.

The cooperative had to seek an extension from none other than Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey, according to Kucerak.

They now have until Aug. 1.

The only other rebranding dictated by law — new logos on all trucks that haul or pull — was met after a whirlwind makeover session by employees.

The cooperative could no longer operate trucks with West Central or FC logos on them as of April 1, Clancy said, but couldn’t operate trucks with Landus logos on them before April 1.

Employees managed to slap the new Landus Cooperative logo on 438 vehicles in eight hours, she said.

Those were just the ones dictated by the Department of Transportation.

The new cooperative, if you’re wondering, owns more than 5,000 total pieces of “rolling stock” (that is, anything with wheels).

Throughout Landus — which operates more than 70 locations in Iowa and Minnesota — each location after the merger vote was ordered to take stock of anything with a logo on it.

Logos were found painted on glass, plastic, metal and concrete.

Those were just the obvious ones.

Jefferson’s metal bins and Beaver’s concrete silo — all bearing humongous West Central logos — have been deemed priorities given their highly visible locations along U.S. Highway 30.

Pens, pencils, foam cups, letterhead, statement sheets, checks, plot signs and visitor parking signs at the cooperative’s Ames headquarters all need to be rebranded, too.

Newly branded hard hats are beginning to find their way to employees.

So far, Kucerak said, every vendor the company has used for new decals has been located in Iowa.

Farmers being farmers, they quickly began asking about new Landus Cooperative hats.

The company has an order of 12,000 hats due in by mid-August.

Yes, you read right — 12,000 hats.

“We hope we’re creating something our members can be proud of,” Clancy said. “We hope they’re excited to wear a Landus hat.”

If nothing else, the rollout of the Landus Cooperative logo is allowing the cooperative to project itself as a company capable of enjoying $1.5 billion in annual sales should.

“It’s amazing over 85 years how many variations of the logo you find,” Clancy said.

From humble roots in humble places — West Central was established in Ralston in 1933; FC came along in 1944 and practically put Farnhamville on the map — the newly formed Landus Cooperative is now among the top 10 largest grain storage companies on the continent.

And, frankly, a company with its own proprietary brand of soybeans and its own line of dairy cattle feed needs to be more protective of its logo.

“The McDonald’s logo looks the same whether you’re in Carroll, Iowa, or New York or Singapore,” Clancy explained. “We want the Landus logo to look the same no matter if you’re in Oakland or Rake.”

A 14-page “brand style guide” — “That’s the mini-version,” Clancy noted — dictates to vendors how the Landus logo is to be used.

As the guide warns, do not change color of logo or add effects such as heavy drop shadow.

Maintain proper proportions.

And the little mark between the words Land and Us isn’t to be touched. Don’t reposition it. Don’t rearrange it.

That little mark holds the key to deciphering the new company’s name — “We are the land and the land is us,” is what the name indicates.

The logo was designed by a Sioux Falls marketing agency and rolled out in February to the cooperative’s 725 full-time employees.

“It had to be functional,” Clancy said of the logo. “It had to work on a silo. It had to work on a truck. It had to work on clothing.”

At first blush, though, Kucerak’s own wife didn’t even like the new name.

“Landus? What is that?” Kucerak remembers her asking.

“The ad agency said that no matter what name you come up with,” he said, “80 percent of the people aren’t going to like it.”

Initially, there was even talk about retaining the West Central and FC names, according to Kucerak, to alleviate a need for rebranding.

“We knew there would be a significant expense to putting new logos on everything,” he said.

In the end, though, the historic merger represents something far bigger than just West Central or FC.

“Both boards unanimously felt it’s a new company,” Kucerak said. “They wanted a name that would symbolize that future.”