Bayer Crop Science Website

After years of stewarding the Monsanto brand, we were more than invested in agriculture; we had honed our expertise sharing it with the entire world. So when Monsanto was acquired by Bayer Crop Science, we were presented with a new opportunity to put our partnership, know-how, and passion for the industry into action to celebrate agricultural innovation on an even greater scale.

There’s bigger, and then there’s better.

To maximize the potential of this incredible transformation, Paradowski helped Bayer Crop Science navigate this new growth to help one of the largest life sciences companies become a definitive leader in agriculture.

With their newly combined capabilities, Bayer Crop Science reached a unique—and enviable—position to create engaging content that audiences wouldn’t typically expect from an agriculture company. However, their existing website architecture fell short of successfully sharing these stories with the depth and breadth they deserved. So we started at square one: 

Crop Science meant many different things to many different people.

Even well before the acquisition, Bayer created a variety of distinct websites to address their many specific audiences. There were separate sites for bees, weeds, and food (to name a few), not to mention the various web properties from legacy Monsanto that needed to be integrated. This of course made it difficult for anyone to get a good idea of what Bayer was all about, let alone explore their other avenues of innovation. 

From audiences to user intent

After conducting research and workshops, we learned that people visited Bayer’s websites for unique reasons, with different expectations, and varying levels of knowledge. So rather than organizing the site based on audience segments, we instead built it for individuals. To do so, we structured the website around user intent, creating an intuitive, user-led experience that provides the freedom and flexibility for anyone to fully immerse themself into any (and every) aspect of Bayer Crop Science that interests them.

Creatives or consultants? Yes.

When the conditions are right, change can be an incredible thing. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Recognizing the positive potential of these fundamental shifts in strategy, our clients brought us in as an extension of their own team to pitch and explain this approach to different stakeholders throughout the journey, ensuring people across the entire organization could be a part of what we were building together.

Streamlining countless stories—and storytellers—into one platform

Crop Science has countless stories worth telling, and there is no single author. Despite all the nuances and rabbit holes that make agriculture compelling, all of these stories, insights, and perspectives ultimately reveal a unifying vision for Crop Science. That’s why we made a specific point of creating a new site that was not only beautiful and engaging for visitors, but intuitive enough for any editor to create and publish incredible content.

Building a narrative, piece by piece

To empower every storyteller at Bayer, we created an intuitive drag-and-drop component library in the Content Management System so any editor can easily create their own custom content pages. No designer or developer required. Rather, this modular design approach allows users to swiftly tell stories that matter, as they happen—saving time and money while enabling an enriched narrative for everyone.

A rich narrative deserves a striking delivery

For Bayer’s content to make the best possible impression for their site visitors, it needed to be visually alluring. Beauty may be subjective, but there is also a subtle science to it.

Bayer’s approach to their corporate color palette had a bit of a contrast problem, which often made their content difficult to read. Using this opportunity to leverage Bayer’s colors in a more accessible way, we ran continual tests throughout our various designs and creative process to ensure that usability and legibility were crystal clear—even going so far as to ensure our color contrast and typographical decisions were AA compliant with ADA standards.

Similarly, we optimized Bayer’s use of color by creating a visual harmony system that matched images to their closet corresponding hue in their main color palette. This enables site editors to avoid many of the contrast and legibility issues that undermined the clarity of their communications.

Putting progress to the test

To ensure our design strategy achieved the desired results, we put our work up against other websites and ran usability and preference tests with audiences around the world. The results were overwhelmingly positive and in our favor. That’s great news for us, for Bayer Crop Science, and anyone curious about the many incredible ways Bayer Crop Science is Shaping What’s Possible for Agriculture. Experience it for yourself at CropScience.Bayer.com