May 14, 2019

Built On Purpose: Unilever Part 2

Revue

Built On Purpose

May 14 · Issue #18 · View online

A newsletter which introduces you to a great, purposeful, and inspiring company every other week.

This week we are following up on Unilever’s brand portfolio. We’ll be taking a look at Dove, Axe, and Knorr followed with a quick big picture recap of how Unilever is building their brand portfolio.

Dove

Unilever former chief marketing and communications officer, Keith Weed, spoke to Marketing Week last year and commented:

Dove has showed, in a really significant way, how to build a brand with purpose. On one side creative that really cuts through the clutter and advertising around a really profound purpose around self-esteem and real beauty. It has become the largest educator of self-esteem in the world.

The 60 year old brand’s purpose is to help create a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety.

Purpose drives marketing

The purpose drives their communications. The purpose manifested in 2004 in The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty with communications centered around all women are beautiful regardless of their size or perceived imperfections. Here’s a 3 minute film from Dove which explores the gap how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves with a whopping 68 million views.

Purpose drives social programs

Not only does purpose drive their communications, it also drives their social campaigns. One of them which continues till today is the The Self-Esteem Project, which began in 2004. The movement is propelled by films, resources, and education tools backed by research along with activities and training that enable teachers.

Purpose-led marketing in the digital world

In this article, Rob Candelino, GM and VP of marketing gives us insight on how Unilever purpose-driven marketing takes shape in the new digital landscape:

Unilever takes a stand, and then creates a comment on society through their campaigns. Then, the people they are paid to serve, the customers, reinforce those comments through their posts.

Similar to P&G, Unilever’s purpose-driven brands start with research and focus groups, where they look for evidence and findings that connects with their purpose. For example, they are able to state facts like below and transform the insight into creative communications that resonate with their customers:

10% of women with curly hair say that their hair is beautiful.
86 % of women reported that they feel a societal pressure to conform and make their hair look a certain way.

A New Process

Back then what was significant about the Dove case study was the adoption of a new branding strategy called (iconic Point of View) P.O.V. - Purpose | Ownership | Vision process.

The idea is to define purpose, ownership, and vision/values. All brand campaigns would be driven by the POV with their own insight. For example, Dove’s initial campaign utilized the insight that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful.

This process is explained by its creator Joah Santos in this TED talk with examples of Lady Gaga and Starbucks.

Axe

Axe is a deodorant brand, which went through a big transformation. Previously the brand appealed to young men by positioning their product as one that helps them attract girls. In 2016 they embarked on transforming their brand with a new purpose:

Ultimately our brand purpose is to inspire guys to express their individuality, becoming their most attractive selves. But we’ve discovered that there is a huge amount of pressure on guys to ‘be a man’ and this is really holding them back from expressing themselves. So we’re on a mission to expose that pressure and empower guys to be whoever they damn well want.

Here is the ad, which aired at the Super Bowl in 2016, about celebrating individuality for a masculine perspective.Learn more about Axe from the global brand manager here.

Knorr

The global cooking brand’s purpose is to enrich people’s lives through flavor. From the lens of sustainability they have to major ambitions:

to source 100% of raw agricultural materials sustainably
to help more than 1 billion people improve their health and well-being by teaching them how to cook nutritiously by 2020

Recently in Philippines Knorr embarked on a pilot program that reduced malnutrition in children by 50 percent in the community chosen for the program. The big idea was coming up “with nutritious, delicious, and affordable meal ideas that were within every household’s budget – and of course to educate parents (primarily mothers) about preparing them.”

What is notable is the holistic approach. Rather than focusing on the malnourished children directly, they focused on empowering their mothers to help children, and, thus, making the approach more sustainable and scalable.

Incubating the brands of tomorrow

Unilever is forward thinking and is proactive in experimenting with new things. They have a digital disruption center in Manhattan known as The Hub, which launched Skinsei, a personalized skincare monthly subscription service.

Here are some other projects they’ve launched:

Kju, a fragrance in China created by a French perfumer and Korean graphic designer in under six months
Hijab, an Indonesian hair-care brand for women who wear Muslim head coverings and based on a Russian formulation
Blow, an on-demand hair, makeup and nail service dubbed “the Uber of beauty” and funded in London by Unilever Ventures
Impulse, a European fragrance brand created in partnership with four German and U.K. beauty bloggers

What’s impressive and noteworthy here is how a big consumer goods company can simultaneously have a venture capital mindset.

Building the purpose-driven brand portfolio

Whew. Across two issues, we’ve covered lots of ground on Unilever’s purpose-driven brand portfolio. We looked at how they transformed some of their existing brands as well as new and upcoming brands they’re incubating. It should also be noted they also acquire brands like Seventh Generation, Dollar Shave Club, and Sir Kensington’s to complete their portfolio.

The movement of purpose-led brand

This concluded our series of purpose brands. Before I sign off, here are some other things I found researching for the last couple of issues showing the purpose brands movement is stronger than ever before.

WARC, an international resource for the marketing industry based in UK, US, and Singapore, gives out annual global awards for marketing excellence. WARC Awards has a category for effective use of brand purpose.
In 2018 Association of National Advertisers’ Marketing Word of the Year was “Brand Purpose.” Speaking of ANA, they also recently established the ANA Center for Brand Purpose.
Early this year P&G acquired This is L., a fast-growing purpose-driven feminine care brand.
I opened this issue with Accenture’s report, From me to we: The rise of the purpose-led brand. It’s worth noting it here again. Here’s a direct download link to the full report.

Thanks for reading. Take great care and see you next issue.

With Purpose,

Justin

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