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Unilever Champions the Power of Big Brand Ideas

Power of Big Brand Ideas

JUDIE LANNON: From your standpoint as head of Unilever's hugely important home and personal care brands, how would you describe the main issues in managing these brands?

SIMON CLIFT: I'd sum up the main issues for Unilever generally as simplification, harmonisation and globalisation. We have been hugely distracted by the great global challenge but there's no question in my mind that we have pulled together the management of our brands in a highly effective and efficient way.

We were a multinational with an enormous geographic spread and complete local control. As a result we had, for example, four or five laundry brand positionings in the Unilever stable – with different brand names in different countries. So Omo is a stain remover in Brazil and gentle fabric care brand in another country. There was no discipline at all and we've spent an enormous amount of energy, particularly over the last five years, in pulling that together to a level that will withstand the full heat of real competition.

JL: What have been the main consequences for brand development?

SC: The way Unilever is now organised makes everything much easier. Brand development the world over reports through the specialist in that category. So I'm responsible specifically for personal care and every personal care brand developer – the people who make ads – reports to me. So no longer do we have the conflict between what a local chairman wants and what the brand specialist wants. The local company is now strictly focused on operations.

JL: This structure is a dramatic elevation of the branding discipline isn't it? It must be a much more efficient use of resources, but isn't there still some resistance from the local offices?

SC: By regionalising and globalising, we've effectively said the old marketing job is going to be divided between people in countries who will worry about things like relations with the trade and all the business issues that are relevant to each particular country. But the needs for brands are different. We're pooling our resources in a global innovation centre that will contain the kinds of people who have much more highly developed brand development skills. They are really very different skills.

So we've recruited people for our innovation centres who lead all advertising in Unilever, which is, after all, the second biggest advertiser in the world. The buck stops with 14 senior vice presidents who have the advertising development budgets for the entire Unilever world, compared with 150 countries staffed by generalists.

JL: From a brand standpoint, what do you see as the single major advantage of this kind of structure?

SC: There's no question in my mind that this structure allows for maximum creativity. Big brand ideas that are sustainable across countries and through time are more likely to be developed with a relatively small number of specialists.

So there are now specialist brand developers who have teams of people around the world. That's why you suddenly get the Dove work. Not only is it a great campaign in the UK and US but it's gone into every country in the world like a hot knife through butter. We have a Dove senior vice president and she's responsible for the US, Europe, South America and Asia, so there's none of this 'not invented here' problem any more.

JL: But what about the inevitable misunderstandings, misinterpretations and all the other problems that come with local implementation?

SC: That is obviously where we do have a bigger challenge because of the divide between central brand development and local country brand activation – in other words, making sure that the brand idea is central to everything that touches the consumer. That's a harder challenge because in the end I can't turn round and say, for instance, the shelf marker in Bangkok doesn't represent the brand. When you visit countries you'll inevitably find that although the big brand idea behind the Dove campaign is 'real beauty', you'll inevitably find there's something that looks like a second-rate L'Oréal ad somewhere that got through by mistake.

JL: Has this restructuring had any down-sides?

SC: One of the consequences is that where we were very good – which usually meant a huge concentration of resources – we may have got less rigorous. People have less time and they have broader jobs. On the other hand, the corollary of that is that brands that were small and not very well managed are now managed much better. For example, Lynx had 20 years of mediocre advertising and now has fabulous advertising that wins prizes the world over.

The net of it is that some of the great brand icons of the past, like Persil in the UK, are now just parts of other global brands, whereas some quite small brands are now global icons. There's been a kind of democratisation, and some have lost and some have gained.

JL: Getting the thinking behind the current Persil campaign into other markets – whatever the brand is called in those markets – seems like a very big move for Unilever.

SC: The current thinking on Persil, the 'dirt is good' campaign idea, is completely counter-cultural for Unilever. And although there are people in the organisation who say we need advertising that is based much more on efficacy, the fascinating thing that we've learned is that the more confidently you assert that children can and should go out and get dirty, the consumer take-out is that it's very, very effective against stains. You don't need fizzing molecules to make the point!

It's the age-old argument about what you put in versus what the consumer takes out – which is not necessarily the same thing. For me, the essence of the debate is that we need to measure what consumers take out, not what we're putting in, which is idiotic. Most pre-testing methods measure what the manufacturers put in, not what the viewer takes out.

JL: This is an important principle for communication and goes to the heart of how companies use research. How does this view affect your use of research – pre-testing specifically?

SC: In my experience if you ask people their reactions to a simple animatic with an amateur voiceover, they'll mostly repeat back the input. But, if you do tracking over a sustained period of advertising that's actually been on air, you'll get real consumer out-take, and they're very different things.

To me the excessive reliance on animatics is crazy – like choosing your wife from a stick drawing. With Dove, for example, it's how the girl comes across – her non-verbal gestures, the cut of her hair and whether she's sympathetic, that determine whether the message is believable. It's not the words put in her mouth. There are lots of examples of where we would have chucked an ad away if we'd believed the quantitative predictive research. With Lynx particularly, there's no way you can tell whether this or that babe is going to be appealing to a 16-year-old boy from a line drawing.

That's why I'm only interested in measuring the output. Let's take the marriage analogy again. You can measure very easily how long somebody has been married, whether they've had children, how faithful they've been. What you can't do is use some kind of fake metric to predict before they're married that the marriage will last 4.6 years and that he'll love her 3.8 on a five-point scale.

And it's the same with communication. In retrospect, we can measure the impact of Lynx advertising in the UK, we can measure awareness and how high certain attributes score. And we must use that information for guiding what we do next. I'm very much in favour of measurement, I just don't believe in predictive research. And we don't use it.

JL: The fragmentation of television and the decline in viewing is changing the landscape for traditional advertisers. What's your view on the next stage?

SC: Television advertising is a time bomb and it is quite clear that as soon as you have a personal video recorder (PVR) you may never watch another ad again. It's interesting to see what ads look like at 30 times speed because that's how you see them and you almost never, even if you're in the business, stop and go back and look at them.

Trying to catch people's attention is obviously harder than ever. The statistics about the fragmentation of audiences, the number of channels, the amount watched and so forth are horrifying. And this has meant that the debate has fundamentally changed. We're no longer having the old argument that says we're here to sell products, we're not here to entertain people. You have to do both and you don't have a snowflake's chance in hell of selling if you don't engage viewers in the first place. (see Figure 1)

So, obviously the next stage is making stuff that people actively want to see and hear. Our advertising for Lynx in the States is an amazing example. It was launched two years ago and is now, against all our expectations, market leader. This is in a market where people are vaguely scandalised by sexual imagery, where there is no existing aerosol market and all the products are anti-perspirants rather than just fragranced deodorants – all of which were cited as reasons for not doing anything there.

JL: How did you get this through?

SC: We simply ignored the market knowledge and launched it. Now the advertising is proving incredibly effective because kids download the ads from the internet and send them to their friends. So a major job for us is driving traffic to the website, which we do with incentives and games and so forth. But this is a viable approach because we know that teenagers in the States spend 50% more time gaming than they do watching television.

JL: Like everyone, I'm sure you're developing 360 strategies. How does this work at Unilever? (see Figure 2)

SC: These 14 senior vice presidents responsible for brand development the world over have all the advertising resources and all the innovation resources as well. So we make a TV ad for Lynx – maybe in the UK or maybe in Buenos Aires or in one of the global centres – and it can go to any country in the world that we decide. But although we are in control of the theme advertising, the other related work will probably be done locally so it's critical that we have close co-operation between the country people and the brand people.

The single most important point is that the stronger and more coherent the brand entity is, the easier it becomes to articulate the brand idea. And, of course, this means the easier it is to express it in different media. If the brand developers have done their job in the different countries, the ideas fall from the trees about how to implement them. Dove is an excellent example of this.

JL: But television still tends to dominate doesn't it?

SC: In developing countries it does, but less so here. But we're still the biggest television advertiser in the UK and television is still very important for us. But there are lots of campaigns that don't go near television and an increasing number of campaigns that require something other than television advertising.

So, the summary is that you need a big brand idea that can be expressed in all sorts of media and promotions and at point of sale because, certainly in developed markets, television will never have the dominance it had.

JL: The Dove campaign has been genuinely groundbreaking. People have been thinking about putting 'real women' in ads for some time but never do it. In fact, when Marks & Spencer tried it with the 'I'm normal' campaign, it didn't work. How did the Dove campaign emerge?

SC: The idea really came from Dove's history. One of the most memorable Dove ads was in the 1970s using a rather overweight black woman saying how she'd used Dove, and she was a very engaging, real person. So it's in the DNA of the brand, but the latest version came from launching a beauty debate on the internet at the Dove site.

There's a real issue that many men are not aware of, which is how many young girls feel oppressed by the need to look like beautiful people in magazines. Girls get bullied and can suffer quite a bit. We're not running a charity, of course, but if you can align your promise with an important and widespread concern you have a very powerful property and one that can be used in so many different ways. (see Figure 3)

JL: The timing of this is obviously right but the execution is excellent.

SC: That's the point. They are aesthetically pleasing. We've got a fantastic photographer called Rankin and everything he does looks gorgeous. The girls are engaging and not fat, just curvy, and he really brings out their personalities.

It's important to realise that that the idea of using real girls in the way we have didn't come from some whacky creative who foisted it on a resentful, functionally driven company. I see it as the way our new structure is working at its best. Because now the decisions about brand ideas – like Dove and Lynx and others – are made by people who are brand visionaries, people who've got fantastic brand development skills.

JL: What do you know now that you wish you'd known 20 years ago?

SC: For me the biggest challenge for Unilever has been shaking off the vestiges of its multi-local past. I think we were always quite good on brands, we always basically understood why brands were important. But what we didn't understand was that the chances of getting 50 brilliant brand ideas in 50 countries working independently were as good as zero.

I wish we'd globalised and harmonised our brands 20 years ago when we still had time. There are all sorts of other challenges like 360, the collapse of TV, the retail press and others that we need to wrestle with. We would be much better off if we'd pooled our resources and concentrated on getting a smaller number of bigger things right.

JL: The operational savings here are obvious but you've really been talking about marketing efficiencies haven't you?

SC: Absolutely. I believe that marketing is still not elevated to a high enough level in many companies. Marketing is far too important to be left to some minor specialist department. When I started in Unilever advertising was done by junior brand managers. Now it's done effectively by people who 20 years ago would have said 'Oh, that's way below me, I've got far too many important things to do than to go to the pre-production meetings.'

The companies that we all admire basically have hero marketers at the helm – Apple and Nike, for example. Yes, they're entrepreneurs, but that's not really necessary. What I admire are the ones that have got a brand philosophy that pervades the whole company.

JL: One final question, what would you say you would like to accomplish by the end of the year? What would you like to remember 2005 for?

SC: I would like to get to grips with how we manage 360 across our organisation. I would like to see a very clever City analyst who knows more about Unilever than anybody else saying he'd like to see more hero stories about marketers in Unilever.

I'd like 2005 to be the year when we move marketing even more firmly up the company agenda. It's still not on the table of the board or the executive committee as much as it should be. I hope that, after 2005, there will many more people who will be the conscience of marketing at Unilever.

This article featured in Market Leader, Winter 2005.

NOTES & EXHIBITS

FIGURE 1: ADVERTISING FOR UNILEVER'S COMFORT BRAND

FIGURE 2: ADVERTISING FOR THE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL LYNX BRAND

FIGURE 3: POWERFUL ADVERTISING FOR THE DOVE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL BEAUTY (SEE CASE STUDY PAGE 43)


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