The Brand Manager is dead….long live the Brand Activist

One of my first memories is sitting on my father’s shoulders at a 1973 Vietnam protest in Holland. As my Mom tells the story, my angelic blonde three-year-old self made quite the impact as I shouted ‘Nixon, Nixon - get your hands off Vietnam!’.

My Dad left his comfortable associate math professor position at a university in his late twenties to head the ‘Interchurch Peace Council’, a church-funded Dutch NGO. In the 1980s, he led the massive European anti-nuclear movement, galvanizing almost 500,000 citizens to demonstrate in Amsterdam and in The Hague. Later on, he fought for human rights in Eastern Europe, built close ties with leaders like Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and en route, became a ‘persona-non-grata’ in East Germany with a large Stasi-file.

I took a different route. My first job after college was in marketing, with consumer goods behemoth Procter & Gamble. My father would jokingly refer to it as ‘The Firm’, after the John Grisham thriller. And while he was proud of my burgeoning career, I’m sure his pride at times was mixed with a sense of bewilderment about how his daughter ended up selling Vicks VapoRub (yes, my very first assignment) at this icon of American capitalism.

Enter the era of disruption

P&G was, in fact, a fabulous brand-building school. On our way to much-revered ‘Brand Manager’ status, P&G’s advertising gurus instilled in my peers and I the importance of ‘distinctive benefits’, product superiority, leading share of voice, and standing out at ‘the first moment of truth’. We’d better make sure consumers knew Olay moisturized more effectively than the next brand over; and that Head & Shoulders removed 100% of dandruff. We moved from brand to brand, irrespective of personal conviction or usage. In fact, many of my male peers worked on Always, which always made for fun conversations at the bar (‘so, tell me a bit about what you do?’). Brand management was a science that could be mastered. For many years, it all worked like a charm.

"Consumers, citizens, indeed people are looking for more. Today, brands need performance and genuine purpose to thrive."

But then, of course, technology started spelling change, even disruption, for brands. Between e-Commerce and social media, it became easier for passionate entrepreneurs and start-ups to claim spaces that big brands had long left untouched. While it had been virtually impossible for newcomers to land on Walmart’s shelves before, suddenly Amazon and Alibaba’s marketplaces offered instant mass distribution to anyone who wanted it.

Combined with savvy social media and digital marketing, new brands popped up to deliver on every new need big companies had long considered ‘niche’. Organic? Check. Vegan? Check. Ethnic? Local? High protein? Check, check, and check…and those were just the big ones. In turn, the big traditional retailers took note, listing many more new brands on their shelves.

Why purpose comes first today

So, what are the big, established brand companies to do? Today, I’m Unilever’s President for Europe; and I believe that the days of ‘managing’ brands are well behind us. Washing shirts a little whiter or making hair a bit shinier than the next brand is still important, but performance by itself is no longer enough. Consumers, citizens, indeed people are looking for more. Today, brands need both performance and genuine purpose to thrive.

A great brand’s purpose is unlikely to be vanilla (‘we help people be happy’); but more likely to be a point of view that not everyone will agree with (‘we should all be vegans’). And that means change for the people behind brands, too. To be competitive with all those committed entrepreneurs out there, brand builders at Unilever need to take a stance, to create movements, to evangelize and even sacrifice. In short, we need brand activists.

"Today, Unilever's fastest growing brands are those with a clear purpose. They grew 47% faster than the rest of the portfolio and delivered 70% of company growth in 2017."

‘Peace, love and ice cream’ magic

Take Ben & Jerry’s, acquired by Unilever in 2000. Of course, the brand makes fantastic ice cream. Just try a pint of Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia (or if you’re feeling particularly peckish, the ‘Vermonster’, a 20-scoop bucket. Really). But the brand’s true magic is in its purpose of ‘peace, love and ice cream’. Peace and love are as alive today as when Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their first parlour in a garage in Burlington in 1978.

The brand team champions inclusion for refugees and LGBTs, and fights climate change. It sponsors Pride. It runs programmes to help refugees integrate back into work. You simply can’t work on Ben & Jerry’s if you don’t believe in its purpose 100% and are ready to go to bat for it. The Ben & Jerry’s brand has grown sales by double digits for many consecutive years.

Keeping it real

Or take Dove, another big, global Unilever brand with long track record of strong growth. Dove makes terrific deodorants, shower and skin care products. But what truly differentiates Dove and the people who work on the brand is their purpose: raising women’s self-esteem. The Dove team champions real beauty, doesn’t use digitally distorted images, and has quietly spent much time educating more than 20 million girls around the world via programmes that help them develop a positive relationship with the way they look.

So have we got it all figured out at Unilever in Europe? Of course not. Some of our brands are still too ‘vanilla’. We need to work harder on reducing the amount of plastic we use. We still have brand portfolio opportunities, despite exciting, purpose-led acquisitions like Pukka herbs and Grom ice cream. And sometimes, we run into heated public debates when others don’t agree with our points of view, or feel we don’t live up to our own high standards. We welcome those discussions.

But most importantly, we know that brand activism is working for us. Today, Unilever’s fastest growing brands are those with a clear purpose. They grew 47% faster than the rest of the portfolio and delivered 70% of company growth in 2017.

My father would be proud.