Context: For more than 150 years, Cargill has provided the world with food, agriculture, financial and industrial products and services. Today, the company employs more than 150,000 employees, across nine stakeholder groups, in more than 70 countries. To say the company's reach is vast is an understatement!

Given the size and complexity of the organization, it is often hard for employees to articulate what Cargill does and why its work is so important. Compounded by the many different products and services Cargill offers; the diversity of work across 70 countries; the many roles nine groups of its 150,000 stakeholders fulfill, from consumers to government partners to investors; internal employees are not equipped to create accurate, compelling value propositions to share with external audiences. 

No such successful process had existed for a variety of reasons — from fundamental problems, like employees not understanding the complex business, to resource issues, like lack of access to supporting, validating data. And the materials to encourage the creation of value propositions that did exist were convoluted and daunting in nature, shared with only high-level, marketing employees who had little communication with other stakeholder groups. 

We were asked to create a toolkit that would enable any employee, in any country, working in any business unit, to easily craft a compelling value proposition about his or her work. The objectives of this toolkit were to not only enable the simple, seamless creation of value propositions to be shared externally and inform marketing and communications strategy, but also foster organizational alignment.  

Methods: framework ideation (prototyping, pressure-testing and implementation), stakeholder interviews, immersion, content creation

Output: value proposition toolkit (below)

My Geek Out Strategy Moment: This might sound generic, but just seeing this toolkit come to life gets me excited. Realizing that if a behemoth company like Cargill can use this, pretty much any large organization can, and knowing that my original framework could serve as a the foundation framework for other similar asks — that's geek material. 

Click on the following image to view the final value proposition toolkit.

In collaboration with VSA Partners