Brands should not continually zig-zag, claims Unilever CEO

I have been lucky enough to meet some amazing people over the last two years on the Inside Marketing podcast, but it’s fair to say that there aren’t many more important people in the world of business than this week’s guest, Unilever’s CEO Alan Jope.

On this week's Inside Marketing podcast, Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever, joins us for an in depth discussion on the many issues facing brands today, from true purpose to media relevance. Listen now:

Unilever is the parent company of some of the world’s most loved brands: Dove, Hellmann’s, Lynx, Persil, Knorr and Magnum, to name but a few. It is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies with over 400 brands (13 of which have a turnover exceeding ¤1bn) with annual revenue of over €50bn.

I normally only talk to marketing people, as Inside Marketing is a marketing podcast, so it is unusual to speak to a CEO – they are increasingly from finance and not marketing backgrounds.

But that is one of the many reasons I admire Unilever. It is an exceptional marketing organisation, it has been a master at building purposeful brands over decades. One of a handful of companies which continually produce brilliant marketing and brilliant marketers, its contribution to the wider marketing industry is enormous.

If you read the marketing press, you may have stumbled across a popular narrative in the last few years, around how ecommerce and direct-to-consumer are slowly killing the traditional big brands. Nobody seems to have told Unilever this: the company recently reported its fastest underlying sales growth in nine years at 4.5 per cent.

Our conversation began by talking about brand purpose. “We’ve been in the news lately on this very issue.

One of our high-profile shareholders has been publicly questioning whether we’ve gone too far on purpose,” Jope says, adding, “Let me be clear, we are not an NGO, we are here to create value for all our stakeholders, that includes our shareholders. We see purpose not as an end in itself, but as a pathway to superior financial performance.”

Purpose is one of thorny issues that polarises many industry contributors, but in my opinion the main point of contention is because too many people simply miss the whole point of purpose. Most of the problems I see with purpose marketing is the marketing, not the purpose.

Jope understands that purpose only works when it has meaning outside the marketing department, so the very fact that, as the CEO, he feels passionately about brands having meaning beyond mere functionality means it’s not a case of marketing tailgating on culture.

“Brands should not be continually zig-zagging, you can’t suddenly wake up one day and say the purpose of my brand is to address this societal issue, you need to think in 10- or 20-year horizons, to build a reputation and talk with consistency about a subject matter, and ideally it should link directly to what the brand’s role is in the world,” he says.

Far bigger

When Jope talks about purpose, he’s talking about something far bigger than marketing, “The strong view that we have is that the walk has to precede the talk, so Dove can only talk authentically about helping a young person’s self-esteem because we’ve helped 60 million young people address the issue.”

Dove was always a great example of purpose done well: firstly it challenged harmful body stereotypes in advertising and broke the rules of the category, but at the same time it does things such as the Self-Esteem Project, it doesn’t just talk about it in advertising.

We believe that the sustainability commitments we have made have saved us €1bn over the last eight years, and a lot of it comes from an early decision we made on shifting into green energy

“Hellmann’s can talk about helping to fight against food waste because firstly it fits very well with the brands’ functional role, putting Hellmann’s on some leftovers, but we’ve been taking action to fight food waste, so when a brand starts talking without taking any action then it is greenwashing,” he says. Jope sums things up nicely by saying: “Purpose is the icing on the cake, it cannot substitute for having a good cake.”

We then get to talking about sustainability. A huge issue now, and as every new generation comes of age, the issue becomes increasingly important.

Jope realises that to be a successful consumer goods company and to keep your brands relevant, you must reflect the values of your consumers. I had always assumed that it costs more to be sustainable, that doing the right thing came at the expense of some forgone profit.

This the total opposite in Unilever’s case. “I want to challenge the assumption that it costs money to be sustainable. Sustainability is often about using less resources. We believe that the sustainability commitments we have made have saved us €1bn over the last eight years, and a lot of it comes from an early decision we made on shifting into green energy. One hundred per cent of Unilever’s electricity used around the world now comes from green sources, we’ve saved an enormous amount of money,” Jope says.

There is more to the picture. “If keeping your brands relevant isn’t enough and if saving money isn’t enough, then good luck trying to attract and employ the best talent in the future if you’re not running your business in accordance with the values that are important to that next generation,” he points out. “We think there’s a really strong business case for sustainability, it is not sustainability or profit, it is sustainability as a pathway to superior profit.”

We talked about the idea that big brands are dying, to which Jope says: “I think the narrative a few years ago was that big brands are doomed, all these insurgent brands are going to nibble away and gradually kill the big brands, but big brands have been getting stronger over the last three years. But it is important that we have the agility in these big brands to compete.”

I ask about Unilever’s approach to marketing, whether it believes in the power of traditional media. Unsurprisingly, given that it is a marketing-led organisation with a common-sense view of marketing, he says: “We believe in a blend of mass communication and more targeted communication.”

And despite what anyone says I believe that is the right approach. Ten years ago, the promise of programmatic meant we would never need mass media ever again. Media agencies seemed to make a virtue of not having your message seen, priding themselves on their ability to restrict visibility to an unhealthily narrow segment of people.

Then Byron Sharp over-corrected and swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, saying we don’t need any target audiences in media.

Non-binary view

The reality is that neither of these things are true or sensible on their own when it comes to marketing effectiveness. I certainly ascribe to that non-binary view of marketing, and if it’s good enough for Unilever then it’s good enough for me.

We talk a lot more about ecommerce: we discuss data and even touch on the areas of in-housing and multi-vendor agency partnerships. For a company with such strong roots in the past, it is a highly innovative, future-facing marketing company and I was surprised when I heard about some of the things it is doing in marketing today, whether that was the sheer scale of its data estate or the in-housing of some creative capability.

As a company, Unilever is steeped in heritage, comprised of brilliant brands that have been built over time, built using the solid foundations of marketing, by people who really understand marketing.

And that’s why, when you hear Alan Jope talking about brands having purpose or sustainability, you know it means more than just an advertising campaign, and you understand that sustainability is not just financially prudent for today, it’s essential for future growth.

Dave Winterlich is chief strategy officer at dentsu Ireland

[ irishtimes.com/insidemarketing ]