I love when history merges with marketing! Last week I visited the 117-year-old Carnation Farms in Washington state. The organization celebrates its history as a way to market its modern businesses.
Here, more than 100 years ago, a selective breeding program of Holstein cows led to a dramatic increase in the volume of milk that cows can produce. The milk was marketed and sold as Carnation Condensed Milk, one of the most famous consumer brands of the era.
The success of Carnation Condensed Milk resulted in tremendous growth for the farm and global expansion. Later, Friskies cat food, another huge consumer product success was invented here on the farm.
Nestle acquired The Carnation Company and its products in 1985. Now the farm is independently owned by family members of the founder.
Today, as an independent business, Carnation Farms is a community-based hub for regenerative food and agriculture, with a retail Carnation Farmstand offering products from the farm and other local producers, a wholesale products business, on-site chef, and epic event spaces. It is a wonderful place to shop and visit.
While I was at the farm, Bob, the company historian, gave me a tour of the achieves and the museum. I was fascinated by what they had saved, including old advertising, details on the milk production of individual cows, and ad budgets. Many companies toss this sort of material into the dumpster.
If your organization has historical documents, consider making them available in digital form on your website. The search engines and LLMs love this kind of content.
For example, I own what I believe is the largest collection of press kits from the Apollo lunar program. I’ve digitized and made dozens of Apollo press kits available to space buffs, historians, fans of mid-century graphic design and others. As far as I know, none of the companies who produced these amazing documents, including IBM, General Electric, Boeing, or Raytheon have made them available to the public.
Celebrate your organization’s history!
