case study of unilever

Unilever—A Case Study

This article considers key issues relating to the organization and performance of large multinational firms in the post-Second World War period. Although foreign direct investment is defined by ownership and control, in practice the nature of that "control" is far from straightforward. The issue of control is examined, as is the related question of the "stickiness" of knowledge within large international firms. The discussion draws on a case study of the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods manufacturer Unilever, which has been one of the largest direct investors in the United States in the twentieth century. After 1945 Unilever's once successful business in the United States began to decline, yet the parent company maintained an arms-length relationship with its U.S. affiliates, refusing to intervene in their management. Although Unilever "owned" large U.S. businesses, the question of whether it "controlled" them was more debatable.

Some of the central issues related to the organization and performance of multinationals after the Second World War can be illustrated by studying the case of Unilever in the United States. Since Unilever's creation in 1929 by a merger of British and Dutch soap and margarine companies, 1 it has ranked as one of Europe's, and the world's, largest consumer-goods companies. Its sales of $45,679 million in 2000 ranked it fifty-fourth by revenues in the Fortune 500 list of largest companies for that year.

A Complex Organization

Unilever was an organizational curiosity in that, since 1929, it has been headed by two separate British and Dutch companies—Unilever Ltd. (PLC after 1981), and Unilever N.V.—with different sets of shareholders but identical boards of directors. An "Equalization Agreement" provided that the two companies should at all times pay dividends of equivalent value in sterling and guilders. There were two head offices—in London and Rotterdam—and two chairmen. Until 1996 the "chief executive" role was performed by a three-person Special Committee consisting of the two chairmen and one other director.

Beneath the two parent companies a large number of operating companies were active in individual countries. They had many names, often reflecting predecessor firms or companies that had been acquired. Among them were Lever; Van den Bergh & Jurgens; Gibbs; Batchelors; Langnese; and Sunlicht. The name "Unilever" was not used in operating companies or in brand names. Lever Brothers and T. J. Lipton were the two postwar U.S. affiliates. These national operating companies were allocated to either Ltd./PLC or N.V. for historical or other reasons. Lever Brothers was transferred to N.V. in 1937, and until 1987 (when PLC was given a 25 percent shareholding) Unilever's business in the United States was wholly owned by N.V. Unilever's business, and, as a result, counted as part of Dutch foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country. Unilever and its Anglo-Dutch twin Royal Dutch Shell formed major elements in the historically large Dutch FDI in the United States. 2 However, the fact that all dividends were remitted to N.V. in the Netherlands did not mean that the head office in Rotterdam exclusively managed the U.S. affiliates. The Special Committee had both Dutch and British members, and directors and functional departments were based in both countries and had managerial responsibilities without regard for the formality of N.V. or Ltd./PLC ownership. Thus, while ownership lay in the Netherlands, managerial control was Anglo-Dutch.

The organizational complexity was compounded by Unilever's wide portfolio of products and by the changes in these products over time. Edible fats, such as margarine, and soap and detergents were the historical origins of Unilever's business, but decades of diversification resulted in other activities. By the 1950s, Unilever manufactured convenience foods, such as frozen foods and soup, ice cream, meat products, and tea and other drinks. It manufactured personal care products, including toothpaste, shampoo, hairsprays, and deodorants. The oils and fats business also led Unilever into specialty chemicals and animal feeds. In Europe, its food business spanned all stages of the industry, from fishing fleets to retail shops. Among its range of ancillary services were shipping, paper, packaging, plastics, and advertising and market research. Unilever also owned a trading company, called the United Africa Company, which began by importing and exporting into West Africa but, beginning in the 1950s, turned to investing heavily in local manufacturing, especially brewing and textiles. The United Africa Company employed around 70,000 people in the 1970s and was the largest modern business enterprise in West Africa. 3 Unilever's total employment was over 350,000 in the mid-1970s, or around seven times larger than that of Procter & Gamble (hereafter P&G), its main rival in the U.S. detergent and toothpaste markets.

A World-wide Investor

An early multinational investor, by the postwar decades Unilever possessed extensive manufacturing and trading businesses throughout Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Unilever was one of the oldest and largest foreign multinationals in the United States. William Lever, founder of the British predecessor of Unilever, first visited the United States in 1888 and by the turn of the century had three manufacturing plants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. 4 The subsequent growth of the business, which was by no means linear, will be reviewed below, but it was always one of the largest foreign investors in the United States. In 1981, a ranking by sales revenues in Forbes put it in twelfth place. 5

Unilever's longevity as an inward investor provides an opportunity to explore in depth a puzzle about inward FDI in the United States. For a number of reasons, including its size, resources, free-market economy, and proclivity toward trade protectionism, the United States has always been a major host economy for foreign firms. It has certainly been the world's largest host since the 1970s, and probably was before 1914 also. 6 Given that most theories of the multinational enterprise suggest that foreign firms possess an "advantage" when they invest in a foreign market, it might be expected that they would earn higher returns than their domestic competitors. 7 This seems to be the general case, but perhaps not for the United States. Considerable anecdotal evidence exists that many foreign firms have experienced significant and sustained problems in the United States, though it is also possible to counter such reports with case studies of sustained success. 8

During the 1990s a series of aggregate studies using tax and other data pointed toward foreign firms earning lower financial returns than their domestic equivalents in the United States. 9 One explanation for this phenomenon might be transfer pricing, but this has proved hard to verify empirically. The industry mix is another possibility, but recent studies have suggested this is not a major factor. More significant influences appear to be market share position—in general, as a foreign owned firm's market share rose, the gap between its return on assets and those for United States—owned companies decreased—and age of the affiliate, with the return on assets of foreign firms rising with their degree of newness. 10 Related to the age effect, there is also the strong, but difficult to quantify, possibility that foreign firms experienced management problems because of idiosyncratic features of the U.S. economy, including not only its size but also the regulatory system and "business culture." The case of Unilever is instructive in investigating these matters, including the issue of whether managing in the United States was particularly hard, even for a company with experience in managing large-scale businesses in some of the world's more challenging political, economic, and financial locations, like Brazil, India, Nigeria, and Turkey.

The story of Unilever in the United States provides rich new empirical evidence on critical issues relating to the functioning of multinationals and their impact. — Geoffrey Jones

Finally, the story of Unilever in the United States provides rich new empirical evidence on critical issues relating to the functioning of multinationals and their impact. It raises the issue of what is meant by "control" within multinationals. Management and control are at the heart of definitions of multinationals and foreign direct investment (as opposed to portfolio investment), yet these are by no means straightforward concepts. A great deal of the theory of multinationals relates to the benefits—or otherwise—of controlling transactions within a firm rather than using market arrangements. In turn, transaction-cost theory postulates that intangibles like knowledge and information can often be transferred more efficiently and effectively within a firm than between independent firms. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that much knowledge is tacit. Indeed, it is well established that sharing technology and communicating knowledge within a firm are neither easy nor costless, though there have not been many empirical studies of such intrafirm transfers. 11 Orjan Sövell and Udo Zander have recently gone so far as to claim that multinationals are "not particularly well equipped to continuously transfer technological knowledge across national borders" and that their "contribution to the international diffusion of knowledge transfers has been overestimated. 12 This study of Unilever in the United States provides compelling new evidence on this issue.

Lever Brothers In The United States: Building And Losing Competitive Advantage

Lever Brothers, Unilever's first and major affiliate, was remarkably successful in interwar America. After a slow start, especially because of "the obstinate refusal of the American housewife to appreciate Sunlight Soap," Lever's main soap brand in the United Kingdom, the Lever Brothers business in the United States began to grow rapidly under a new president, Francis A. Countway, an American appointed in 1912. 13 Sales rose from $843,466 in 1913, to $12.5 million in 1920, to $18.9 million in 1925. Lever was the first to alert American consumers to the menace of "BO," "Undie Odor," and "Dishpan Hands," and to market the cures in the form of Lifebuoy and Lux Flakes. By the end of the 1930s sales exceeded $90 million, and in 1946 they reached $150 million.

By the interwar years soap had a firmly oligopolistic market structure in the United States. It formed part of the consumer chemicals industry, which sold branded and packaged goods supported by heavy advertising expenditure. In soap, there were also substantial throughput economies, which encouraged concentration. P&G was, to apply Alfred D. Chandler's terminology, "the first mover"; among the main followers were Colgate and Palmolive-Peet, which merged in 1928. Neither P&G nor Colgate Palmolive diversified greatly beyond soap, though P&G's research took it into cooking oils before 1914 and into shampoos in the 1930s. Lever made up the third member of the oligopoly. The three firms together controlled about 80 percent of the U.S. soap market in the 1930s. 14 By the interwar years, this oligopolistic rivalry was extended overseas. Colgate was an active foreign investor, while in 1930 P&G—previously confined to the United States and Canada—acquired a British soap business, which it proceeded to expand, seriously eroding Unilever's market share. 15

The soap and related markets in the United States had a number of characteristics. Although P&G had established a preponderant market share, shares were strongly contested. Entry, other than by acquisition, was already not really an option by the interwar years, so competition took the form of fierce rivalry between incumbent firms with a long experience of one another. During the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, Lever made substantial progress against P&G. Lever's sales in the United States as a percentage of P&G's sales rose from 14.8 percent between 1924 and 1926 to reach almost 50 percent in 1933. In 1930 P&G suggested purchasing Lever in the United States as part of a world division of markets, but the offer was declined. 16 Lever's success peaked in the early 1930s. Using published figures, Lever estimated its profit as a percentage of capital employed at 26 percent between 1930 and 1932, compared with P&G's 12 percent.

Countway's greatest contribution was in marketing. During the war, Countway put Lever's resources behind Lux soapflakes, promoted as a fine soap that would not damage delicate fabrics just at a time when women's wear was shifting from cotton and lisle to silk and fine fabrics. The campaign featured a variety of tactics, including washing demonstrations at department stores. In 1919 Countway launched Rinso soap powder, coinciding with the advent of the washing machine. In the same year, Lever's agreement with a New York agent to sell its soap everywhere beyond New England was abandoned and a new sales organization was established. Finally, in the mid-1920s, Countway launched, against the advice of the British parent company, a white soap, called "Lux Toilet Soap." J. Walter Thompson was hired to develop a marketing and advertising campaign stressing the glamour of the new product, with very successful results. 17 Lever's share of the U.S. soap market rose from around 2 percent in the early 1920s to 8.5 percent in 1932. 18 Brands were built up by spending heavily on advertising. As a percentage of sales, advertising averaged 25 percent between 1921 and 1933, thereby funding a series of noteworthy campaigns conceived by J. Walter Thompson. This rate of spending was made possible by the low price of oils and fats in the decade and by plowing back profits rather than remitting great dividends. By 1929 Unilever had received $12.2 million from its U.S. business since the time of its start, but thereafter the company reaped benefits, for between 1930 and 1950 cumulative dividends were $50 million. 19

Many foreign firms have experienced significant and sustained problems in the United States. — Geoffrey Jones

After 1933 Lever encountered tougher competition in soap from P&G, though Lever's share of the total U.S. soap market grew to 11 percent in 1938. P&G launched a line of synthetic detergents, including Dreft, in 1933, and came out with Drene, a liquid shampoo, in 1934 both were more effective than solid soap in areas of hard water. However, such products had "teething problems," and their impact on the U.S. market was limited until the war. Countway challenged P&G in another area by entering branded shortening in 1936 with Spry. This also was launched with a massive marketing campaign to attack P&G's Crisco shortening, which had been on sale since 1912. 20 The attack began with a nationwide giveaway of one-pound cans, and the result was "impressive." 21 By 1939 Spry's sales had reached 75 percent of Crisco's, but the resulting price war meant that Lever made no profit on the product until 1941. Lever's sales in general reached as high as 43 percent of P&G's during the early 1940s, and the company further diversified with the purchase of the toothpaste company Pepsodent in 1944. Expansion into margarine followed with the purchase of a Chicago firm in 1948.

The postwar years proved very disappointing for Lever Brothers, for a number of partly related reasons. Countway, on his retirement in 1946, was replaced by the president of Pepsodent, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Luckman, who was credited with the "discovery" of Bob Hope in 1937 when the comedian was used for an advertisement. Countway was a classic "one man band," whose skills in marketing were not matched by much interest in organization building. He never gave much thought to succession, but he liked Luckman. 22 This proved a misjudgment. With his appointment by President Truman to head a food program in Europe at the same time, Luckman became preoccupied with matters outside Lever for a significant portion of his term, though perhaps not to a sufficient degree. Convinced that Lever's management was too old and inbred, he dismissed about 15 percent of the work force soon after taking office, and he completed the transformation by moving the head office from Boston to New York, taking only around one-tenth of the existing executives with him. 23 The head office, constructed in Cambridge by Lever in 1938, was subsequently acquired by MIT and became the Sloan Building.

Luckman's move, which was supported by a firm of management consultants, the Fry Organization of Business Management Experts, was justified on the grounds that the building in Cambridge was not large enough, that it would be easier to find the right personnel in New York, and that Lever would benefit by being closer to the large advertising agencies in the city. 24 There were also rumors that Luckman, who was Jewish, was uncomfortable with what he perceived as widespread anti-Semitism in Boston at that time. The cost of building the New York Park Avenue headquarters, which became established as a "classic" of the new postwar skyscraper, rose steadily from $3.5 million to $6 million. Luckman had trained as an architect at the University of Illinois, and he was very involved in the design of the pioneering New York office.

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In April this year, Hein Schumacher, chief executive of Unilever, announced that the company was entering a “new era for sustainability leadership”, and signalled a shift from the central priority promoted under his predecessor , Alan Jope.

While Jope saw lack of social purpose or environmental sustainability as the way to prune brands from the portfolio, Schumacher has adopted a more balanced approach between purpose and profit. He stresses that Unilever should deliver on both sustainability commitments and financial goals. This approach, which we dub “realistic sustainability”, aims to balance long- and short-term environmental goals, ambition, and delivery.

As a result, Unilever’s refreshed sustainability agenda focuses harder on fewer commitments that the company says remain “very stretching”. In practice, this entails extending deadlines for taking action as well as reducing the scale of its targets for environmental, social and governance measures.

Such backpedalling is becoming widespread — with many companies retracting their commitments to climate targets , for example. According to FactSet, a US financial data and software provider, the number of US companies in the S&P 500 index mentioning “ESG” on their earnings calls has declined sharply : from a peak of 155 in the fourth quarter 2021 to just 29 two years later. This trend towards playing down a company’s ESG efforts, from fear of greater scrutiny or of accusations of empty claims, even has a name: “greenhushing”.

Test yourself

This is the fourth in a series of monthly business school-style teaching case studies devoted to the responsible business dilemmas faced by organisations. Read the piece and FT articles suggested at the end before considering the questions raised.

About the authors: Gabriela Salinas is an adjunct professor of marketing at IE University; Jeeva Somasundaram is an assistant professor of decision sciences in operations and technology at IE University.

The series forms part of a wider collection of FT ‘instant teaching case studies ’, featured across our Business Education publications, that explore management challenges.

The change in approach is not limited to regulatory compliance and corporate reporting; it also affects consumer communications. While Jope believed that brands sold more when “guided by a purpose”, Schumacher argues that “we don’t want to force fit [purpose] on brands unnecessarily”.

His more nuanced view aligns with evidence that consumers’ responses to the sustainability and purpose communication attached to brand names depend on two key variables: the type of industry in which the brand operates; and the specific aspect of sustainability being communicated.

In terms of the sustainability message, research in the Journal of Business Ethics found consumers can be less interested when product functionality is key. Furthermore, a UK survey in 2022 found that about 15 per cent of consumers believed brands should support social causes, but nearly 60 per cent said they would rather see brand owners pay taxes and treat people fairly.

Among investors, too, “anti-purpose” and “anti-ESG” sentiment is growing. One (unnamed) leading bond fund manager even suggested to the FT that “ESG will be dead in five years”.

Media reports on the adverse impact of ESG controversies on investment are certainly now more frequent. For example, while Jope was still at the helm, the FT reported criticism of Unilever by influential fund manager Terry Smith for displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of managing the business.

Yet some executives feel under pressure to take a stand on environmental and social issues — in many cases believing they are morally obliged to do so or through a desire to improve their own reputations. This pressure may lead to a conflict with shareholders if sustainability becomes a promotional tool for managers, or for their personal social responsibility agenda, rather than creating business value .

Such opportunistic behaviours may lead to a perception that corporate sustainability policies are pursued only because of public image concerns.

Alison Taylor, at NYU Stern School of Business, recently described Unilever’s old materiality map — a visual representation of how companies assess which social and environmental factors matter most to them — to Sustainability magazine. She depicted it as an example of “baggy, vague, overambitious goals and self-aggrandising commitments that make little sense and falsely suggest a mayonnaise and soap company can solve intractable societal problems”.

In contrast, the “realism” approach of Schumacher is being promulgated as both more honest and more feasible. Former investment banker Alex Edmans, at London Business School, has coined the term “rational sustainability” to describe an approach that integrates financial principles into decision-making, and avoids using sustainability primarily for enhancing social image and reputation.

Such “rational sustainability” encompasses any business activity that creates long-term value — including product innovation, productivity enhancements, or corporate culture initiatives, regardless of whether they fall under the traditional ESG framework.

Similarly, Schumacher’s approach aims for fewer targets with greater impact, all while keeping financial objectives in sight.

Complex objectives, such as having a positive impact on the world, may be best achieved indirectly, as expounded by economist John Kay in his book, Obliquity . Schumacher’s “realistic sustainability” approach means focusing on long-term value creation, placing customers and investors to the fore. Saving the planet begins with meaningfully helping a company’s consumers and investors. Without their support, broader sustainability efforts risk failure.

Questions for discussion

Read: Unilever has ‘lost the plot’ by fixating on sustainability, says Terry Smith

Companies take step back from making climate target promises

The real impact of the ESG backlash

Unilever’s new chief says corporate purpose can be ‘unwelcome distraction ’

Unilever says new laxer environmental targets aim for ‘realism’

How should business executives incorporate ESG criteria in their commercial, investor, internal, and external communications? How can they strike a balance between purpose and profits?

How does purpose affect business and brand value? Under what circumstances or conditions can the impact of purpose be positive, neutral, or negative?

Are brands vehicles by which to drive social or environmental change? Is this the primary role of brands in the 21st century or do profits and clients’ needs come first?

Which categories or sectors might benefit most from strongly articulating and communicating a corporate purpose? Are there instances in which it might backfire?

In your opinion, is it necessary for brands to take a stance on social issues? Why or why not, and when?

Climate Capital

Where climate change meets business, markets and politics. Explore the FT’s coverage here .

Are you curious about the FT’s environmental sustainability commitments? Find out more about our science-based targets here

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How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work

How should the consumer goods company upscale its global workforce for the future?

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Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work initiative aimed to accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization and prepare its workforce for a digitalized and highly automated era. But despite its success over the last three years, the program still faces significant challenges in its implementation. How should Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, best prepare and upscale its workforce for the future? How should Unilever adapt and accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization? Is it even possible to lead a systematic, agile workforce transformation across several geographies while accounting for local context?

Harvard Business School professor and faculty co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work Project William Kerr and Patrick Hull , Unilever’s vice president of global learning and future of work, discuss how rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation are changing the nature of work in the case, “ Unilever’s Response to the Future of Work .”

BRIAN KENNY: On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched the latest version of ChatGPT, the largest and most powerful AI chatbot to date. Within a few days, more than a million people tested its ability to do the mundane things we really don’t like to do, such as writing emails, coding software, and scheduling meetings. Others upped the intelligence challenge by asking for sonnets and song lyrics, and even instructions on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of King James. But once the novelty wore off, the reality set in. ChatGPT is a game changer, and yet another example of the potential for AI to change the way we live and work. And while we often view AI as improving how we live, we tend to think of it as destroying how we work, fears that are fueled by dire predictions of job eliminations in the tens of millions and the eradication of entire industries. And while it’s true that AI will continue to evolve and improve, eventually taking over many jobs that are currently performed by people, it will also create many work opportunities that don’t yet exist. Today on Cold Call , we welcome Professor William Kerr, joined by Patrick Hull of Unilever, to discuss the case, “Unilever’s Response to the Future of Work.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Professor Bill Kerr is the co-director of Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work initiative. His research centers on how companies and economies explore new opportunities and generate growth, and he is a fellow podcaster. He hosts a show called Managing the Future of Work . Bill, thanks for being here.

Bill Kerr: Thanks for having us.

BRIAN KENNY: And Patrick Hull is Unilever’s VP of Global Learning and Future of Work. He goes by Paddy. Paddy, thanks for joining us.

PATRICK HULL: Thank you very much for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you both here today. I think people will really be interested in hearing this case and how Unilever is thinking about the future of work. So why don’t we just dive right in. And, Bill, I’m going to ask you to start by telling us what the central issue is in the case, and what your cold call is to start the discussion in class.

Bill Kerr: Well, Brian, I think your introduction clearly outlined the central issue, which is technology is really transforming the world of work. And that means, companies must learn how to do things different than what they’ve done over 50 or a hundred year history. And it also means they must transform the skill base in how they’re approaching employees and talent. I think we can simply say: that ain’t easy, and it’s also going to introduce significant challenges and tensions for organizations. A big company like Unilever is going to really want to appeal to employees, put the purpose of the company in front of employees, embrace that, but it’s also going to have to make challenging decisions regarding employees and their transition of skills and what’s the future workforce going to look like. So the most common cold call is a really simple question, which is: has Unilever, through its Future of Work Program, resolved the paradox of profit and purpose? And pretty quickly, the answer to that is, “no.” It hasn’t fully resolved that. I will occasionally get maybe one person that goes all the way there. So then we’ve got to start unpacking, okay, how close is it to resolving that? And are we very near the end point or are we farther away?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Simple question to you maybe, but probably not to others who are listening. That sounds like a pretty complex question. I mentioned your involvement with the Managing the Future of Work initiative here. So I know you think a lot about this. This is on your mind all the time. How did you hear about what Unilever was doing, and why was it important to you to write this case?

Bill Kerr: Well, it’s interesting. The history of the connection came through another case that we wrote. Very early in our project on Managing the Future of Work , we’re always very deliberate about putting the “managing” in front of the future of work, and that we want to think about how leading companies are reacting to the forces that are shaping the future, like digitization and demographic changes and so forth. So, we’ve written a case about Vodafone, which we did a Cold Call a while back. With Vittorio Colao. And Vittorio was on Unilever’s board and said, “You have got to go and meet this organization and see what they’re doing,” because they have one of the most comprehensive, well thought out programs for the future of work that he had come across. And in fact, that was the connection that then followed on. And yes, for a sector that Unilever’s working in that has end-to-end change going on from the manufacturers, all the way down through the consumers or the products, to be able to have an organization that’s thought very deeply about what pillars do we need to put into place to make the change occur is great. The other thing that was delightful about Unilever and writing this case study is that, a lot of times, companies want to talk about their programs, only after they know that it was a success. They would prefer to wait until they’ve… They’re like, wait another two years and then we’ll write the case study about this transformation. But Unilever’s been very upfront in saying, “The future of work’s a big challenge. We have to get in front of that. Here’s what we’re doing. We haven’t necessarily figured it all out yet, and some of this will prove wildly successful. Others may be challenging, but this is where we’re going.” And that’s been a great thing to really spark a lot of executives and students a conversation about, what will the future of work require, and how can we get there?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So, Patty, I have to ask, I have to start by asking you, what’s your job? Because your title’s very lofty. It basically calls you a visionary. You are the VP of Global Learning and Future of Work. So what do you do?

PATRICK HULL: I’ve got a funny answer to that question. Since the pandemic, and obviously, been working a lot from home, and I work in a slightly open area, so my wife gets to hear a little bit of what I’m talking about. She seems to think that what I do is laugh a lot and chat a lot to people. So that’s what-

BRIAN KENNY: Kind of like we’re doing today. So, she’s listening in…

PATRICK HULL: She says, “When do you do some real work?” But yes, I guess what I do is work with a really passionate, dedicated team of people who are looking at how are we preparing our organization, and our people in particular, for a future that is very different to what we’ve been experiencing in our traditional work models up to this point. You mentioned ChatGPT as well. I mean, that really is the talk of the town at the moment. And I guess we’ve been thinking for a bit of time, as Bill mentioned, about the impact of things like that on our business, and trying to get on the forefront of what’s our response to that. So I wouldn’t quite say visionary. I think, at this stage in business and what’s going on, it’s quite hard to be truly visionary, but trying to stay one or two steps slightly ahead of what’s going on in the world of work, that’s, I guess, what my job’s all about.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. That’s great. For our listeners who… I think most people have heard of Unilever, but for people who aren’t really aware of the scope and scale of Unilever, can you describe the business for us a little bit?

PATRICK HULL: Yes. So we’re a fast moving consumer goods business. So most of you will probably interact with one of our brands or products every day. In fact, we say that we serve 3.4 billion people every day. That’s how often someone buys one of our products or uses one of our products. We’ve got about 400 brands in 190 countries across the world, ranging from global brands like Dove, Sunsilk, Hellmann’s, Rexona, all the way through to what we call local jewels like Marmite in the UK, which is one of those brands that you either love it or hate it.

BRIAN KENNY: How big is the workforce at Unilever?

PATRICK HULL: The workforce is about 149,000 people who are directly employed by us. But we always often speak about how we have an extended workforce of around 3 to 5 million people, who if you ask them who they work for, they would say Unilever, even though they’re actually employed by someone else.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So we know Unilever well at Harvard Business School. We’ve had lots of cases written on over the years by our faculty, and we’ve actually talked about it on Cold Call before, particularly, the focus on sustainability. Unilever really stands out in this regard. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how important this is to the culture at Unilever.

PATRICK HULL: It is. I can’t tell you how important it is. In fact, when Paul Polman, previous CEO, came into the organization in 2009, he launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan in 2010. And he did this beautiful job when he launched it of reminding us that sustainability has been part of Unilever since day one. When Lord Leverhulme started selling Sunlight soap, his mission was to make cleanliness commonplace. That was back in the late 1800s. And what Paul did beautifully is he then simply shifted that a little bit and said, “We are now here to make sustainable living commonplace, because now we impact so many more people and so many more homes. If we can help every consumer out there make more sustainable choices with how they eat, how they clean, how they use plastic, how they use water, then we can have a massive impact, positive impact, on the planet and society, and that’s good for business.” That was the business model that we’ve ascribed to. So we hire on it. We are tracked on it. We develop on it. It’s definitely part of the way things get done here.

BRIAN KENNY: Bill, let me turn back to you for a second. The FMCG sector is fast moving, as it indicates. What are some of the forces that are putting pressure on that particular sector these days?

Bill Kerr: Yeah. The case outlines three forces, and let me walk through those and also say a little bit of, before I do that, why we think this sector’s amazing to watch. If you want to have a kind of front row seat as to how the future of work may play out in other sectors, I often direct them towards the fast moving consumer good sector because the technology forces, the demographic forces, the gig workplace force that we’ll talk about are all happening already. They’re deep into this sector, so we can learn a lot from it. So, the first one is clearly technology that links through all the way to our opening conversation. There’s many ways in which the touch points between consumers and the outlets and last mile delivery and drones possibly dropping off future packages reverberates all the way up through the supply chain to Unilever and its suppliers above. A simple kind of easy metric is, think about the speed that we now demand or expect of our package delivery. It’s no longer that we’re going to go to the store and pick this up and the store can replenish itself over a week-long horizon. It’s going to be, I just pressed the button in the app and I’m expecting it in the next five minutes to be handed to me. That puts a lot of demands on how an organization needs to function, and also increase the expectation about the customization and the personalized products that consumers will require. So, the technology requires Unilever to think differently. The second is a broader force, but equally as impactful, and even more predictable for the future, which is the role of aging populations and demographic change in the workplace that is quite different than the workplace of the 20th century, where many of the large companies today kind of got their grounding. One of the early kind of points that it makes is that, in the UK, about a third of the workforce currently is over the age of 50, and that’s true in most every advanced economy, as well as also, increasingly across East Asia and elsewhere, that we have older populations. We have workforces that are going to span many more generations in the workplace. And then the third one, which in our project, Managing the Future of Work , we think of as kind of an outcome of tech and demographics coming together is the gig workplace. Paddy talked about the extended workforce beyond Unilever, and the case tries to unpack some of the ways they’re approaching bringing people to work that aren’t the traditional full-time jobs that most companies got built up around. And the gig workplace is activated by that technology that lets us schedule and involve people in gig works. And also, as we think about low unemployment rates and older populations and tacked out and so forth, the degree that we can, as a company, attract in people that are currently not working or at the edge of working and tempt them to come work for us on projects is a very valuable labor supply to these organizations.

BRIAN KENNY: Paddy, you’re in it, literally. So what are you seeing as some of the things that have shifted over time?

PATRICK HULL: So, when I started, I’m going to give my age away here a little bit, but back in the 1990s, I remember us talking a lot about, how could we get direct to the consumer? Back in those days, we sold everything through big box retail, and it was all about maintaining those relationships, making sure you had great store shelf positioning and great relationships with those buyers. One of the most massive shifts is that direct to consumer is the channel now. Bill spoke about how we all just order stuff off Amazon directly. We don’t have any advantage anymore in terms of getting to consumers. You and I, any little startup, can throw some ads on Instagram, speak to a few influencers and start sending their products out. So the whole game has changed in terms of how are we reaching people.

BRIAN KENNY: And I can already imagine, just based on the examples you’ve both given, I’m already seeing areas where there would be churn in the workforce around some of these developments. So let’s talk a little bit about Unilever’s Future of Work plans. And there’s a framework that goes along with it. I wonder if you could describe that and talk about the three pillars that support that framework.

PATRICK HULL: Yes, our three pillars are: change the way we change, ignite lifelong learning, and redefining the Unilever system of work. And I’ll explain a little bit about each of those. So changing the way we change. The first one is, what we’ve realized is that change is continuous. Disruption is continuous in our organization. It’s not about standalone moments where we see that, oh, we need to shut down a factory or change something because of a dramatic shift. Change is happening all the time. All of our factories are rapidly automating all of our office processes, so we can’t stick to the old traditional model of change, which was a very slow moving consultative approach, and also, where management held its cards close to its chest until sort of the last moment and then announced, “This is happening.” We’ve realized that, really, to be true to our purpose around making sustainable living commonplace, we need to enter into a far more open, early, proactive dialogue with our people around the change that’s affecting our organization, and how to help start preparing them well in advance of any actual impact on them in terms of how they can prepare for that change. So that’s the first one, changing the way we change. The second one around igniting lifelong learning is about engaging with our people to make sure that they’re all equipped to thrive, both now and into the future, and that we are showing them a bit of what that future looks like and where they need to be focusing their attention. And then the third, redefining the whole system of work is a bit of what Bill was mentioning earlier. Here, we really want to embrace this notion of accessing talent rather than owning talent. We’ve felt that if we just keep on trying to hold onto all our FTEs and compete against everyone else with talent, we are never going to have the people and the skills in our organization that we need to take us forward into the future. So we really want to redefine new models of working, so it’s not just you’re either fixed or you’re a gig worker, but how can we find some flex in the middle that helps people transition out of this traditional life cycle of work, the kind of 40-hour, 40-week, 40-year traditional employment pattern, and help get them future fit for a hundred year life, where they may want to slowly move into retirement, where they may want to spend some time looking after their kids, where they may want to set up their side hustle. How do we create that sort of flexibility?

BRIAN KENNY: There’s definitely, and understandably, a lot of emotion involved with some of these things. And I’m wondering if maybe you could give our listeners a sense, based on all the research you’ve done in the initiative, about what kinds of jobs are going to go away, and what kinds of skills you think are going to be most important for people to think about in the future?

Bill Kerr: Well, Brian, I come back with, that we don’t think of jobs really going away. And I think it’s important to instead think of jobs as a collection of tasks. And certain tasks will be taken over by the machine and require less human input, as the technology gets more advanced. And that could be in a very manual kind of sense. It could also be with ChatGPT in a more cognitive relationship. And perhaps, the thing that we’re experiencing right now that’s very front and center in the world of work is, lots of ways that technology is coming in towards more cognitive tasks that are complex, they’re non-routine. They were not able to be done by the computer before, but artificial intelligence machine learning and so forth are able to take those off. So if you think about how supply chain forecasting will happen at Unilever, that’s going to be done in a fundamentally different way than it would’ve been even 10 years ago.

BRIAN KENNY: Sure.

Bill Kerr: But we always think about new tasks emerging, and it’s hard to predict exactly what those tasks will involve. When you think about the skills, we know that having digital fluency and also social skills are the two biggest things that you can put money on, bank on, those being important enough for the future. But there’s also going to be judgment, and there’s going to need to be innovativeness. So even if the computer starts to do a really good job at predicting about how salespeople should arrange the shelves or how they should approach consumers, you still have to think about, as an organization, what data are we feeding into the system? And where could Unilever develop a proprietary data advantage? And how would we collect those data streams and put them into it? So the technology will be there, it’s going to take over evermore parts of work as it has been for 150 years at this point, but there’ll also be places where humans will be complementing and helping to achieve the goals of the company.

BRIAN KENNY: So that’s an optimistic viewpoint, Paddy. And I’m wondering what the response is from people when you start to talk about these ideas with them. And how do you move them beyond just their own insecurity and concern for themselves, to really embrace learning new skills and thinking about a different way of working in the future?

PATRICK HULL: This is a fundamental dilemma facing us, Brian. I’m so glad you asked me that question. And whilst I don’t know if we’ve cracked it, I think we’ve got a really good hypothesis around what helps this. One of the things we know is, the way not to motivate people to learn new skills is to tell them, “You better re-skill or the robots are going to take your job away.” So we’ve taken the view that if we can help people to discover their purpose, what makes them unique, how do they approach work in their own way, and then start from that point and say, “Okay, when you are at your best, you are doing these things. How do we make sure that you are developing the skills in line with that, that are going to keep you future fit in an environment that is changing around you in terms of the nature of your job and how you work?” And we’ve found that when people come from that place of purpose, they do feel far more agency over it. They are far more motivated to learn new skills, to continue to be relevant, but it’s coming from a much more positive place. It’s not coming from that fight or flight or freeze sort of mode. It’s coming from a place of agency. And in fact, we partnered with some academic institutions to measure the impact of starting people thinking about purpose and then creating future fit plans from there. And we’ve found that it does lead to people being 25% more engaged in thinking about the future, in going the extra mile, in having this intrinsic motivation to take it on. And they’re 22% more productive, which is another great benefit to us.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So, Bill, we’ve been through situations like this before. If you look back over the long arc of history, we’ve had movement from an agrarian society to an industrial society. We’ve had manufacturing sector turned on its head when a lot of manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. And I think each time we’ve done that, there’s been a portion of the workforce that’s just not been able to make the leap to the new mode of doing things. Unilever is talking about ensuring that 80% to 100% of their workforce can be transitioned in the right way. Is that too big of a promise to make?

Well, to their credit, I believe they stayed at the pretty top end of that range so far. And I think the workshops and so forth that Paddy just outlined are best in class for trying to stay up there. I do think, Brian, you see organizations, and I’m spanning out from Unilever at this point, that are trying to set a new contract with workers, both explicitly and implicitly, that says, “Our part of the bargain is, we’re going to give you great clarity as to what roles we see the company needing in the future, and help you kind of think about where you are today and what you would need to acquire skill-wise to get to that future point. And we’re going to give you the platform to acquire those skills. But your part of the bargain has to be to put the time and the investment in to be having those skills when that time comes.” And so I think we’re seeing a shift in a bit of the, we want to be a great place for you to have worked and developed your career, but we’re not going to be guaranteeing a lifelong employment. We’re going to focus on the skills that are needed and help you make the investments and choices that should be made.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And what does that start to look like at Unilever, Paddy? What are some of the ways that you’re sort of redefining the systems of work there?

PATRICK HULL: So, one of the big initiatives that we’ve undertaken was this whole idea of, how do we help people create more flexibility in their roles, so that they can discover new ways of working, discover new skills, grow in new and different ways? And I mentioned to you earlier that we thought there’s this sort of gridlock that, on the one hand, you’ve got full-time employees, you’ve got lots of security, but no flexibility in terms of how and where they work. And on the other hand, you’ve got gig workers, freelancers, lots of flexibility, but not much security in terms of guaranteed income. And we’ve set ourselves a challenge of, how do we create this responsible alternative to the gig economy? And our idea was something called U-Work. U-Workers no longer have a job title. They work on gigs and projects in Unilever, but they are still 100% Unilever employees. They are not gig workers, so they’re not contractors or anything. In fact, they’re an internal pool of contractors, if you like, but they remain Unilever employees. They get a guaranteed retainer. They get a package of social care, pension benefits, healthcare benefits. And they get a learning stipend. But in return for that, they then only need to work on projects. They can set up their own business on the side. They can look after their kids or aging parents, or they can gradually move into retirement. And I think it’s this kind of thing that we need to continue to explore, as we see in the impact of automation and digitization, and also this trend or this desire for people to have more flexibility to choose how and when they work.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. It actually sounds kind of appealing. So you also get variety that goes along with that. You get to move from one project to another, and you’re not sort of locked in on the same kinds of things, all the time.

PATRICK HULL: And, Brian, the one thing, just to emphasize on that, people get very locked into the thing of, ah, does someone have the skill I need for the job? In fact, what we found is, one of the most important skills is knowing the organization. So U-Work is great because they are Unilever employees. They know the organization. They know how to get things done in Unilever. And we must never underestimate the power of that skill

BRIAN KENNY: Bill, it seems like anytime that we enter into one of these huge labor market transitions, manufacturing jobs, take it on the nose. And so I’m wondering, as you think about the implications for jobs in the future, what are the implications for manufacturing specifically?

Bill Kerr: Well, I think, Brian, we’re already been seeing that in motion for a while. Manufacturing has been at the forefront of technology adoption for decades. I think time will tell how it will continue to evolve. I would anticipate more skilled, more advanced, more technology enabled, but there could also be some interesting twists. It’s not the current case study that we’re talking about, but there’s another case study at Harvard Business School, done by Raj Choudhury, our colleague, with Unilever that’s about remote manufacturing. So how can the remote workforce be connected into the manufacturing sector? So we’ll see a lot of innovation towards the future.

BRIAN KENNY: And how is Unilever thinking about that, Paddy?

PATRICK HULL: So actually, the whole genesis of this future of work framework was done together, well, co-created together with our European Works Council actually, so our manufacturing representatives coming together with management to think about, how is the future of work impacting the manufacturing environment? So actually, our whole framework came from them. So, we very much see this as a critical way of addressing the impact of digitization and automation in the manufacturing environment. We’ve found some fantastic examples where we’ve started people thinking about their roles in future. And what we’ve found is, there’s quite a strong correlation between some of the skills our manufacturing workers have and lab assistants in our R&D labs. And funnily enough, we tend to have quite big R&D centers right next to our factories. So we’ve seen quite a bit of movement of people being able to re-skill from manufacturing environment into R&D labs in a way, a more sustainable future environment, all because they’ve identified, what’s the work that they really enjoy doing, what are they really good at, and then what are the skills required to go into the future?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. That’s a huge win-win, right? For the worker and for the firm.

PATRICK HULL: Correct.

BRIAN KENNY: This has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m wondering if… I’ve got time for one question for each of you left here. So, I’m going to start with you, Paddy. How is Unilever going to know if they’re succeeding in this? Is there a sort of an end game in mind here?

PATRICK HULL: The big goal is obviously that we are proving that our sustainable business model is more effective than others in terms of driving superior performance. So the big number is still, how are we doing as an organization? I would say the key input metrics are things like, how well are we able to re-skill our people for the future? We really believe that re-skilling is the way forward. We know it’s cheaper than recruiting from outside. It’s better for our people. It’s a way of getting people who know our business to continue to do good things. So we do measure that. How many people are we helping to transition? And then it’s about, how attractive do we continue to be as an employer for new recruits and for the people within our organization? So we’ll track the traditional input metrics like engagement, attrition, our employer brand, how well people are collaborating going forward.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. It sounds like you’re off to a fantastic start. Bill, I’ll give you the last words, since you wrote the case. If there’s one thing you’d like people to remember about this case, what is it?

Bill Kerr: Well, let me go back. We started with the cold call, so let me tell you how I end the class. There’s a video of one of Paddy’s colleagues, Nick Dalton, who is quoting President Kennedy, who was in turn quoting an Irish writer named Frank O’Connor. And Kennedy was speaking about the space mission, and Frank O’Connor was describing, as a kid, when they would come to this orchard wall that was too high for them to climb over. They had no idea how they were going to do it. They would take their hats and they would throw them over the orchard wall, so that they just committed themselves to figuring it out. And Nick basically thought of the Unilever program as a bit of, “We’re throwing our hat over the wall. We don’t know exactly how we’re going to climb over this future of work wall, but we know we must do it. And this is our public commitment to making that happen.” And the thing I’d come back to listeners around this is, the future of work is scary. And we talked about job transitions and how quickly the new technologies are coming. This time last year, we had no thought of ChatGPT as being part of this Cold Call podcast, but now, it’s what we lead with. And so, hopefully, people can unfreeze a little bit and can start thinking about, regardless of what the twists and turns may lie ahead, they need to begin a journey with their employees. And Unilever is showing, here’s how we’re approaching that. Now, let’s all work on it together.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Well, I suspect I’m not alone when I say we’re rooting for you. We hope that you get this right. There’s a lot at stake.

PATRICK HULL: Thanks, Brian.

BRIAN KENNY: Thank you both for joining me.

Bill Kerr: Thanks.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call , you might like our other podcasts, After Hours , Climate Rising , Deep Purpose, IdeaCast , Managing the Future of Work , Sk ydeck , and Women at Work . Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] . Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call , an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.

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This article is about change management.

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Unilever Change Management Case Study

In today’s fast-paced business environment, change is inevitable.

Companies need to evolve and adapt to remain competitive, but managing change is not an easy task. Effective change management is crucial to the success of any organizational transformation, as it ensures that the changes are implemented smoothly and effectively.

In this blog post, we will examine a case study of change management at Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies.

We will explore the challenges faced by Unilever, the change management approach it took, and the results of its initiatives.

Brief History and Growth of Unilever 

Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational consumer goods company that was founded in 1929 through a merger between Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie and British soap maker Lever Brothers.

Unilever has a long history of growth through mergers and acquisitions, with notable acquisitions including Bestfoods, Ben & Jerry’s, and Dollar Shave Club.

The company operates in over 190 countries and has a diverse portfolio of products, including food and beverages, cleaning agents, beauty and personal care products.

Unilever has also been committed to sustainability and social responsibility, and in 2010, it launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which aims to reduce the company’s environmental impact and improve the health and well-being of its customers.

Today, Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, with a revenue of over €50 billion in 2020.

External factors that led to organizational changes at Unilever

Unilever is a multinational consumer goods company that has undergone several organizational changes over the years. Here are three external factors that led to organizational changes at Unilever:

• Changing Consumer Preferences: The changing preferences and behaviors of consumers can have a significant impact on a company’s strategy and operations. For example, as more consumers started to prioritize eco-friendliness and sustainability, Unilever had to shift its focus towards more sustainable products and packaging. This led to the introduction of products like the “Dove Refillable Deodorant” and “Omo EcoActive” laundry detergent, as well as a commitment to reduce its plastic packaging by half by 2025.
• Competitive Pressure: Competition is another external factor that can force companies to make organizational changes. For example, when Unilever faced increasing competition from other consumer goods companies in emerging markets like India and China, it had to restructure its operations to be more efficient and cost-effective. This led to the consolidation of its global supply chain, as well as a greater emphasis on localizing its products and marketing strategies to better appeal to these markets.
• Technological Advancements: Advances in technology can also lead to organizational changes, as companies need to adapt to new ways of doing business. For example, as more consumers started to shop online, Unilever had to develop a strong e-commerce presence and optimize its digital marketing efforts. This led to the creation of Unilever Digital, a team dedicated to digital marketing and e-commerce, as well as a partnership with Alibaba to expand its online distribution in China.

Internal factors that led to organizational changes at Unilever

In addition to external factors, internal factors can also lead to organizational changes at Unilever. Here are three examples of internal factors that have led to organizational changes at the company:

• Management Changes: Changes in top management can often lead to organizational changes. For example, when Paul Polman became CEO of Unilever in 2009, he initiated a major restructuring of the company that aimed to streamline operations and focus on sustainable growth. This led to the consolidation of Unilever’s foods and personal care divisions, as well as a greater focus on emerging markets and sustainability.
• Financial Performance: Poor financial performance can also prompt organizational changes. For example, in 2017, Unilever reported slower-than-expected sales growth, leading the company to undertake a strategic review of its operations. This resulted in a decision to sell or spin off Unilever’s spreads business and focus on higher-growth areas like beauty and personal care.
• Organizational Culture: Organizational culture can also drive organizational change. For example, when Unilever identified a need to become more agile and innovative, it undertook a major cultural transformation initiative called “Connected 4 Growth.” This involved restructuring the company into smaller, more autonomous business units and giving employees greater freedom to experiment and take risks. The initiative aimed to foster a more entrepreneurial culture within the company and enable faster decision-making and innovation.

05 biggest steps taken by Unilever to implement changes

Unilever is a multinational consumer goods company that has undergone several organizational changes over the years. Here are the five biggest steps taken by Unilever to implement changes:

1. Sustainable Living Plan

In 2010, Unilever launched its Sustainable Living Plan, a comprehensive sustainability strategy that aimed to reduce the company’s environmental footprint, improve social impact, and drive profitable growth. The plan set ambitious targets for Unilever to achieve by 2020, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% and improving the livelihoods of millions of people in its supply chain. The Sustainable Living Plan has been a driving force behind many of Unilever’s organizational changes, such as the introduction of sustainable products and packaging and a greater emphasis on transparency and accountability.

2. Organizational Restructuring

Unilever has undertaken several major organizational restructuring initiatives over the years to streamline its operations and focus on high-growth areas. For example, in 2016, Unilever announced a plan to consolidate its foods and personal care businesses into a single division, with the goal of achieving greater efficiency and cost savings. Similarly, in 2017, Unilever announced a strategic review of its operations in response to slower-than-expected sales growth, resulting in a decision to sell or spin off its spreads business and focus on higher-growth areas like beauty and personal care.

3. Digital Transformation

As more consumers started to shop online, Unilever recognized the need to invest in its digital capabilities to stay competitive. In 2017, the company launched Unilever Digital, a team dedicated to digital marketing and e-commerce, and entered into a partnership with Alibaba to expand its online distribution in China. Unilever also invested in technology startups and acquired several digital companies to enhance its digital capabilities and drive innovation.

4. Cultural Transformation

Unilever recognized that its organizational culture needed to change to foster greater agility and innovation. In 2016, the company launched its “Connected 4 Growth” initiative, which involved restructuring the company into smaller, more autonomous business units and empowering employees to take more risks and experiment. The initiative aimed to create a more entrepreneurial culture within the company and enable faster decision-making and innovation.

5. Portfolio Transformation

Unilever has undergone several portfolio transformations over the years to focus on its core brands and divest non-core businesses. For example, in 2018, Unilever acquired the personal care and home care brands of Quala, a Latin American consumer goods company, to strengthen its presence in emerging markets. At the same time, the company divested its spreads business and announced plans to exit its tea business to focus on higher-growth areas. These portfolio transformations have helped Unilever to stay agile and adapt to changing market conditions.

05 Results of change management implemented at Unilever

The change management initiatives implemented at Unilever have had several positive outcomes and impacts. Here are some of the key examples:

• Increased Sustainability: The Sustainable Living Plan has been a key driver of Unilever’s sustainability efforts, and the company has made significant progress in reducing its environmental footprint and improving social impact. For example, by 2020, Unilever had achieved its target of sending zero non-hazardous waste to landfill from its factories, and had also reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 46% per tonne of production.
• Improved Financial Performance: Unilever’s focus on portfolio transformation and strategic acquisitions has helped the company to improve its financial performance. For example, in 2020, the company reported a 1.9% increase in underlying sales growth and a 2.4% increase in operating profit margin.
• Enhanced Digital Capabilities: Unilever’s investments in digital transformation have enabled the company to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. For example, Unilever’s partnership with Alibaba has helped the company to expand its online distribution in China, while its investments in technology startups have helped to drive innovation and enhance its digital capabilities.
• Improved Organizational Agility: Unilever’s organizational restructuring and cultural transformation initiatives have helped to create a more agile and entrepreneurial company culture. This has enabled Unilever to make faster decisions and respond more quickly to changing market conditions.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction: Unilever’s focus on innovation and product development has resulted in the launch of several successful new products and brands, such as the plant-based meat alternative brand, The Vegetarian Butcher. These products have helped to increase customer satisfaction and drive growth for the company.

Final Words

Unilever’s successful implementation of change management is a testament to the company’s commitment to innovation, sustainability, and organizational excellence. By undertaking a variety of initiatives, such as the Sustainable Living Plan, organizational restructuring, digital transformation, cultural transformation, and portfolio transformation, Unilever has been able to adapt to changing market conditions and position itself for long-term success.

One key factor in Unilever’s success has been its ability to align its change management initiatives with its overall business strategy. By focusing on high-growth areas, investing in sustainability, and enhancing its digital capabilities, Unilever has been able to drive growth and improve profitability while also achieving its sustainability goals.

Another key factor has been Unilever’s emphasis on collaboration and stakeholder engagement. By working closely with suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders, Unilever has been able to create a shared sense of purpose and drive greater alignment around its sustainability and innovation goals.

About The Author

Tahir Abbas

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How Unilever Went From Soap Manufacturer To Multinational Giant

Table of contents, here’s what you’ll learn from unilever’s strategy study:.

• How to make the most out of the opportunities you meet.
• How to be proactive with market changes and thrive by adapting quickly.
• How product innovation becomes the source of competitive advantage.
• How strengths like in-depth knowledge of specific markets become powerful expanding factors.
• How to grow by taking advantage of unparalleled localization.
• How growth opportunities are revealed by empowering your management.
• How sustainability can be used as a brand lever.

With over 2.5 billion people consuming its products on any given day, it’s difficult to find any corner of the world where Unilever has not reached.

What started as one soap brand has now become one of the world’s largest consumer brand conglomerates, spreading into beauty and personal care, home care, and food and refreshments.

Unilever's market share and key statistics:

• Staggering turnover of €52.4 billion in 2021
• Portfolio of 400+ brands, 13 of which feature in Kantar Worldpanel Global Top 50
• 14 brands with a $1 billion turnover
• Over 53,000 supplier partners
• Number of employees worldwide: 148,000
• Owning  280 factories, 270 offices and 450 logistics warehouses globally
• A reach spanning over 190 countries

From innovative strategies and impeccable management to effective marketing and commitment to sustainability, there are several reasons behind the success of this multi-industry giant.

In this study, we analyze them closely to highlight how Unilever has been able to continuously expand its horizons over the years and across countries as well as continents, gaining a competitive edge while growing exponentially.

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Humble beginnings: How did Unilever start?

Although it wasn't until 1929 that the company we now instantly recognize as Unilever was formed, its story goes way back to the late 19th Century.

In fact, it is set in two different countries simultaneously, with two major companies operating in seemingly different industries coming together and setting the foundation of Unilever.

In many ways, it can be said that it set the tone for what sort of brand Unilever was going to be in the coming years.

More than just soap

William Hesketh Lever began his career in the 1880s as a salesman in his family's grocery business. At the time, The Long Depression was still affecting the global economy, and many companies were struggling to survive.

Amidst the chaos, Lever saw an opportunity to step into the manufacturing of soap, which he believed had great potential for growth.

Thus, in the 1890s, as the founder of Lever Brothers, William Lever penned his ideas for Sunlight Soap: "to make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness, that life may be more enjoyable and rewarding for the people who use our products."

Mission and vision statements were hardly a thing during the Victorian era. Yet, Lever was well ahead of his time. They envisioned changing attitudes towards hygiene and personal care in the UK and solve customers’ problems simultaneously.

Soon, the company was not only making waves in the British Isles, but also began expanding its reach in many parts of Europe, North America, Australia, and South Africa.

The first bar of Sunlight Soap was in 1884

Diversifying operations

In the early 1900s, much of Britain's consumption of butter and margarine was sourced from Dutch and Danish companies. However, with the threat of WWI and trade coming to a standstill, the British government asked Lever to produce margarine as well.

Recognizing that the required raw materials, including oils and fats, were quite similar for soaps and margarine, William Lever welcomed the opportunity with open hands.

From there on, Lever became more than a soap company as it took its first step towards forming a multi-brand legacy that would inspire and lead the world of consumer brands for the next century and probably, beyond.

A manufacturing company through and through

Not only did Lever plan to manufacture its products, but it also extended its operations to produce its raw materials itself.

From mills to crush seeds for vegetable oil to whole transportation and packaging operations, Lever became a well-established vertically integrated company, taking giant strides to redefine the consumer goods industry.

The Dutch side of things

Before Lever Brothers had set foot in the margarine industry, there was already intense competition in the Dutch market.

To see off new entrants exporting their products at lower prices and to make the most of the global economic situation, two Dutch giants Jurgens and Van den Bergh joined hands in 1908.

A few years later, in 1920, these two companies combined with Schitt and established their operations in the Netherlands as Margarine Unie NV and in England as Margarine Union Limited.

This put them in direct competition with the Lever Brothers and what ensued was a tussle of giants for most of the following decade. 

Putting Uni and Lever together

Both the Dutch and English companies knew they would benefit from synergies if they came together rather than going head-to-head in the soap and margarine industries.

Thus, after two years of discussions, they merged in 1929 to form Unilever, which was owned by two holding companies, Unilever Limited and Unilever NV, with setups in both countries.

The structures for the holding companies were identical, and the profit-sharing was on an equal basis.

This merger allowed the company to foray into multiple industries and establish dominance with its hold on manufacturing operations.

Key takeaway 1: cash In on opportunities

With the amalgamation of two companies – Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie – Unilever was formed.

From Lever entering an utterly new soap manufacturing business to competitors Jurgens and Van den Bergh combining, there are countless examples of the founders of Unilever realizing an opportunity and being quick to grab it. 

Navigating The Great Depression – Initial Challenges

Unilever was still in its early years when the Great Depression struck, and the company was riddled with challenges on all fronts.

Its products’ prices plummeted 30% to 40% within the first year while at the same time butter came forward as an even cheaper alternative, further lowering the demand for margarine. The company’s agricultural products, such as cattle cake, also took a major hit and its retail grocery and fish shops saw a major decline in revenues.

Things did not look too bright for the company that had already shown so much promise and growth. However, just as William Lever had come out of the Long Depression as a successful business, Unilever responded proactively to this crisis too.

Responding to the challenge

The 1930s saw fresh faces managing the operations at Unilever with Francis D'Arcy Cooper at the helm of affairs.

This new management’s initial response to the Great Depression was to form a special committee that would oversee the firm’s operations in both Netherlands and UK. It also supervised two further committees; one that would handle the company’s business in Europe and one for other regions.

These actions helped the company mitigate the immediate effects of the recession and lay the groundwork for further changes.

Restructuring & redistributing assets

Initially, the Dutch group contributed two-thirds of Unilever's total profits while the British side accounted for the remaining. However, owing to trade conflicts in Europe, similar to those preceding WW1, the equation was reversed, and the British group's contribution increased.

Therefore, in 1937, Cooper convinced the company’s boards that it was time for restructuring, and Unilever needed to align itself with its original goal of equal profit sharing. As part of this dynamic shift, one significant action was selling the Lever Brothers Company in the United States and other Lever Brothers' assets outside Britain to Unilever's Dutch group.

This allowed the two factions to operate with nearly equal profit volumes and assets and overcome the trade challenges.

Key takeaway 2: proactively adapt to the situation

Had Unilever not set up the special committee and undergone the changes it did in the 1930s, it is possible it would not have survived the Great Depression. But with pro-activeness and resilience, it was able to tackle the challenges successfully and come out on the other side stronger than before.

Growth Through Localization & Innovation

Following the years of the Great Depression and WWII, the world’s economic landscape completely transformed. At that point in time, Unilever was establishing itself in various countries and needed a strategy to localize its products, marketing efforts, and management.

It realized that growth in new markets now was not limited to or even dependent on increasing production capacities or lining up products. It needed to have a strong footing in research and development to keep up with changing consumer preferences and increasing competition.

This meant that the company had to make some much-needed changes in its approach and it did just that.

Heading into new markets

Unilever was growing and expanding its operations into many new countries and diverse communities. This meant more local challenges wherever it set up operations. However, much of the management was still under the control of Dutch and English representatives of the parent companies.

Undoubtedly, the people from the parent head offices were capable managers and had contributed to the company's growth, but the challenge here was different. Markets such as India, Brazil, or even the USA did not function in the same way as European Markets.

Customers had different preferences, supply chains were unique, and external influencing factors, such as laws and regulations, were also always specific to the respective regions. Therefore, Unilever's management needed local players who could understand what was required in their region and develop effective strategies to achieve it. 

Hence, in the 1940s, Unilever started a localization policy referred to as 'ization.’ The Dutch and English representatives were recalled, and local positions were handed over to local executives.

It began to be implemented as early on as 1942, with the company’s Indian subsidiary going through the process of Indianization. Australianization, Brazilianization, and more followed it. These centers had greater autonomy in decision-making and marketing, which enabled the company to penetrate further into these new markets and localize its products.

Unilever continued with this localized, decentralized management system throughout WWII and several years following. However, they did encourage Unileverization, sharing a common mission across their various subsidiaries during this time, and took it up more rigorously later on.

Embracing research & innovation

The embracing of research did not occur before facing a few setbacks. For instance, the market for soap, Unilever’s main product, revolved around color, scent, and application on fabrics. This changed when in the 1950s, their competitor in the US Market, Proctor & Gamble, introduced Tide. This nonsoap synthetic detergent powder was far superior and solved many plumbing problems caused by insoluble soaps.

For some years, Unilever remained behind its competitors until it found a way to solve the shortcomings of new detergent.

Tide was formed from petrochemicals, and its residues in sewerage systems and rivers were causing major problems. Now, Unilever had the chance to explore chemical technology and retain its position in the market. By 1965, they had launched their very own biodegradable version of the product.

It wasn’t just soap where Unilever invested in research. The company also established 11 research centers, including laboratories, all around the world to come up with innovative solutions for food preservation, health, and animal care. That was going to define the company as one that looked ahead into the future and relied on improving itself to remain at the top.

Another significant example of Unilever's constant innovation can be seen in its margarine. When butter was short in supply, margarine became a convenient alternative – one of the reasons why the Lever Brothers started manufacturing it in the first place. However, butter soon became available widely again, and that too at lower prices. Now, there was not much that made margarine an enticing option to customers.

Unilever's laboratory in Vlaardingen was tasked to find a way to improve the quality of margarine and make it stand out, whether through better nutrition, flavor, or convenience. The solution came in the form of enhanced refining of soybean oil, a key raw material in margarine production. 

Benefiting from tariff lift

A major boost to Unilever's operations was the formation of the European Economic Community and its efforts to make Europe a common market in the 1950s and 1960s.

Previously, Unilever has based its factories and production in various European countries to avoid tariff restrictions. It was, however, an inconvenient solution. Not only did they have to bear additional costs of production in expensive locations, but such a spread-out production system posed the challenges of supply, logistics, capacity, and more.

Through the common market, there was no need to restrict themselves anymore. Unilever now took its production to wherever costs could be minimized, and operations could be consolidated. Thus, they were able to produce in greater quantities and accelerate their processes.

Key takeaway 3: innovate & solve

Unilever's growth in 1940 to 1960s had a lot to do with improving their products and their management system to cater to modern problems. This helped them stay ahead of the competition and keep their production up-to-date and cost-effective all the while delighting customers.

Expansion & Acquisitions Till The 1990s

As a well-known multi-industry firm, Unilever was no stranger to acquisitions and takeovers. They expanded in the US Market in 1937 by adding the tea manufacturer Thomas J. Lipton Company to their portfolio. Later on, in 1944, they also entered the toothpaste industry by acquiring Pepsodent.

In the post-WWII era, they continued to take over larger firms like Birds Eye, a UK frozen foods company, in 1957. By 1961, they had also taken control of US ice cream producer, Good Humor. 

Unilever acquires Birds Eye parent company T. J. Lipton in 1943

However, these were only gradual acquisitions that allowed them to explore new product lines. From the 1980s, Unilever's approach took an aggressive turn, and they set their eyes on bringing many more brands under their banner.

The shopping spree of the 80s

Unilever’s targets changed in the 1980s. They wanted to expand but with a plan to strengthen their hold in industries in which they had resources and expertise and the market had a lucrative potential for growth. This meant they were sticking to foods, detergents, toiletries, etc. but were ready to eliminate the competition.

Thus, they began by selling off their ancillary business and services, such as transporting, packaging, and initiating their acquisitions. In 1984, Unilever oversaw a hostile takeover of the British tea company Brooke Bond for £376 million. The company complemented Unilever’s Lipton in the USA, and now, the road was clear for further growth.

One of Unilever’s biggest acquisitions was of Chesebrough-Pond in 1986. The company owned some very high-potential and popular products in the USA like Vaseline Intensive Care and Pond's Cold Cream. Moreover, with over $3 billion in annual sales, it was the perfect chance to cement itself in the personal product business internationally.

Another major market that the company dominated with its acquisitions in the late 1980s was the perfume and cosmetic industry. It simultaneously became the owner of Shering-Plough's perfume business in Europe, Calvin Klein in the US, and Fabergé Inc. The latter was bought for $1.55 billion and handed Chloe, Lagerfeld, and Fendi perfumes to Unilever.

Now, the company was a force to reckon with, if not the leader in its primary industries and in the markets it predicted would generate the most gains.

The global giant

Unilever clearly showed its aggressive intent in the 1980s, and they were not going to stop in the 1990s.

By 1992, the conglomerate consisted of over 500 businesses in 75 countries. In the mid-1990s, they went on to acquire over 100 more companies. From buying personal care giant Helene Curtis for $770 million to sweeping the US ice cream market by buying Philip Morris's Kraft General Foods’ division for $215 million, there was no shortage of the treasure chest Unilever had.

By 1999, they had grown from 500 businesses to 1600 brands. But this brought them back to where they started the extensive series of acquisitions, with many companies that didn't have the potential to grow or simply didn't fall in with Unilever's strengths.

It was time for a major strategy shift and to go back to the basics. Out of 1600 brands, 400 were generating 90% of the revenue. Unilever decided to let go of the remaining 1200 and put all its efforts into strengthening its already powerful brands.

This has been their path ever since and one that has enabled them to maintain their position as one of the top consumer products companies in the world.

Toppling competitors

Along with buying their competitors, Unilever did not stop introducing new products into the market. In 1984, their product Whisk overtook P & G’s Cheer in the US laundry detergent market.

Two years later, Whisk was introduced in Britain, along with Breeze, a soap powder the company had only seen of in Surf. Unsurprisingly, Unilever recorded a 50% growth in operating profits for detergent products while it also experienced increasing returns in the food industry.

This multi-pronged strategy of introducing new products and acquiring ones with potential did not allow Unilever to capitalize fully on the market's potential for growth and left little room for competitors to adjust.

Standing out from the competition

From Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie taking on their rivals head-on to Unilever PLC establishing its unique identity despite battling against giants P&G and Nestle, the company has always embraced healthy competition.

One of the main reasons Unilever has been so successful in standing out is its expansion in over 190 countries through products they specialize in and dominate in. Moreover, it hands significant decision-making power to local managers to strengthen their position in diverse markets. Both P&G and Nestle have not been able to grow as much in terms of reach.

Another, key aspect that differentiates Unilever is its emphasis on and funding towards Research & Development. They continue to improve their products and adapt to changing consumer needs by providing enhanced solutions.

Last but not least, Unilever’s sustainable plans set them apart from major competitors, whereby they show their commitment to the collective betterment of people and societies.

Key takeaway 4: stick to your strengths

Unilever’s origins lay in soap and margarine – industries they knew very well and had the potential to grow in. They expanded their portfolio but stuck to their strengths and, as a result, grew exponentially.

Changing Product Groups With Evolving Markets

Throughout the nearly 100 years of Unilever, they have acquired and sold brands and expanded their reach into many territories. Naturally, they experiment with product groups and divisions to decide which suits their goals best and when.

At times, their product groups have had a significant influence on their strategies, whereas at other times, they were merely playing advisory roles. But whatever the situation, Unilever has kept an eye on how operations and revenues were affected and carefully reorganized their groups accordingly.

Understanding complex markets

There is no one fixed way to distribute product groups. Sometimes, they require to focus on research and distribution while emphasizing localization from time to time. For instance, the food industry, from which many of Unilever's top brands belong, undergoes changes every few years. It can be categorized into three regional groups.

Firstly, the global fast-food category. Fried chicken, burgers, soft drinks, etc., are famous worldwide, from Asia to Europe and beyond. The core products remain the same, and the tastes do not differ greatly.

The next category is international foods. These are products that belong to one country but are also popular in other countries as well—for example, Chinese, Indian, and Italian foods.

Hence, the third category leads to national foods – those that represent and are popular in their country of origin. For Unilever's base region, the UK, pies, puddings, steaks, etc., are considered national foods.

Now, that is only one way to look at food markets. Another method or problem, as you may call it, is that a product may not even be defined or preferred the same way in different regions.

For example, take something as simple as tea - a globally consumed product. The British like their tea hot and with milk; Americans prefer it iced; Middle Easterners drop the milk and add sugar.

Therefore, Unilever cannot keep its product groups fixed or stringent and must recognize where it can churn out the most profits.

Giving more autonomy to product groups

Until the 1960s, Unilever's localization policy played a major role in its decisions and actions. Product groups served advisory or assisting roles with little power. That was how to company was progressing, and there was no need for change.

Carrying on the example of food products, during and post-WWII, raw material sourcing was a crucial factor in the production of Unilever foods. But then, when the 60s came, and firms, along with Unilever, started to invest in research, the dynamic shifted towards preservation technology and logistics.

Gradually, the power of determining revenues was handed to product groups, and local managers took a backseat. A pivotal change made in the new structure was introducing three separate food units: edible fats, frozen foods and ice cream, and a general food and drinks group.

These groups proved fruitful and helped the company expand in the European and North American markets. 

Rising consumer awareness

The 1970s was the time the marketing arena transformed. With every brand wanting to stand out, they popularized concepts, such as healthy eating and natural ingredients.

The surge in demand for low-calorie foods was also a result of effective marketing. The challenge for Unilever was that all three of its food groups contained low-calorie products. It came in the way of their progress and dented their profits.

But how could they form a system that resolved this problem and kept local managers and product groups intact?

Unilever formed a committee called “Food Executive” consisting of three directors. Its role was to control all food products instead of leaving it to specific groups or managers.

Now, there are 5 product groups:  edible fats, meals and meal components, beverages, ice cream, and professional markets. They play an essential role as advisors (more valued than in the 1960s) but are not responsible for profits.

Simultaneously, local managers are allowed to oversee the regional needs and preferences of consumers.

Key takeaway 5: balancing decentralization and product groups

Managers and product groups are both vital components of a multinational firm. To ensure their products satisfy consumers’ wants, Unilever continues to come up with ways to combine the two productively.

Unilever Strategy - Management Dynamics Over The Years

One of the key factors that have fueled Unilever's growth ever since 1929 is its evolving management dynamics that have allowed the company to stay true to its roots while adapting to the local areas it operates in. 

Think globally. Act locally!

Think globally and act locally has been at the heart of Unilever's operations and enabled it to make a mark in even the most far-flung areas successfully. As a result of trial and error, Unilever's management dynamics over the years showcase the company's drive to excel, innovate, learn, and get the job done. 

Let's delve deep into the management dynamics to better understand the growth of the company. 

Given that both the parent companies of Unilever had a tradition of scaling their business through export as well as local production that British and Dutch expatriates mostly ran, it comes as no surprise that Unilever, too, had the same management style initially. British and Dutch executives ran the show, at least for the first decade. However, in the early 1940s, Unilever began changing things by hiring local managers to lead the operations in respective parts of the world, as already highlighted in Chapter 3.

The localization and decentralization began with the subsidiary in India in 1942. Key roles were given to Indian managers, who were also provided with the freedom and flexibility to run operations on their own with little involvement from the head office on a day-to-day basis. 

This process of localization of management, in addition to the growing competition as well as the alienation of the subsidiaries during World War 2, led to decentralization, with each subsidiary becoming a self-reliant and self-sufficient unit. 

This is where the senior management decided that while decentralization has indeed paid off, it would be in the company's best interest to guard against too much of it. Hence, to ensure that the Unilever culture, vision, and mission were shared among all subsidiaries, Unileverization was promoted. 

It has now become a long-standing practice at Unilever to regularly train managers from around the world, be it at a Unilever Four Acres facility or hired facilities in local areas, to ensure that Unilever's values are ingrained and followed everywhere.

The Unilever management matrix, which mainly consists of local talent and initiative with centralized control, is empowered to think transnationally. From nurturing local talent to cross-posting managers worldwide so that they can gain diverse experiences, better understand the Unilever culture, and establish unity, an array of practices are followed. 

Break communication barriers

Given the sheer size and scale of Unilever around the globe, effective communication across borders is an essential need for it. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the most relevant and used language for all forms of communication is English.

Hence, Unilever actively looks for employees with fluency in the English language when hiring and regularly invests to develop the English language as well as communication skills in general for its employees through various training programs. 

Pick the cream of the crop

Alone you can only go so far; together the sky is the limit with what you can achieve. Unilever takes it a step further by hiring the best as well as the brightest and then unifying them to achieve remarkable results. 

While it comes as no surprise that Unilever pays huge emphasis on onboarding the right people, the way how it goes about the process of recruitment offers a lesson to other businesses. Right from the mid-twentieth century, Unilever has continued to pioneer employee section systems.

From getting involved in universities to spot talent early on to sponsoring an extensive range of business courses, Unilever has done it all. Plus, trainees – as part of a group – are offered on-job experiences and courses at training facilities, allowing Unilever to create a holistic network of individuals whose informal experiences act as a glue that drives the company.

In addition to this, the vast system of attachments that allow employees to work on temporary assignments and projects in different parts of the world further grooms them offers them exposure and provides the 'know-how' of how Unilever functions. This empowers them and helps them further the unique Unilever way of working wherever they go next. 

The company's formal structure, together with the informal exchanges leads to the transfer of ideas, enhances communication, and fosters collaboration, which in turn, boosts innovation and helps solve problems, allowing Unilever to continue to grow. 

Modern workforce and workplace

Being resourceful is the new corporate approach of Unilever, which accounts for a number of organizational changes to prepare for the future, including:

• Tapping the open talent economy to boost the workforce whenever needed
• Harnessing the power of digital to drive business growth
• Being more creative and thinking out of the box to achieve goals
• Creating a better work-life balance and work environment

One example of Unilever’s unique approach to setting itself up for success in the future and unlocking its capacity to grow is its “YourFreelo” program in which internal resources of the company are offered holistic support through freelancers with different perspectives and handy skills.

Iterative improvements thanks to trial & error

From the outside, it may appear that it is Unilever's transnational strategy that has helped pave its way to success. While that wouldn’t be wrong to conclude but if we delve deep, we can find that it’s the messier revolution brought to the fore by continuous trial and error that has driven the company.

Hiring and training managers and leaders carefully, as well as linking decentralized units with a common culture, are the primary reasons behind the company's growth. That being said, the company has cautiously treated the path of an informal transnational network, realizing that it can elevate risks and lead to complacency.

To guard against it, the company continues to shake up the system every now and then, shifts roles, and responsibilities and evolves in the dynamic business world where change is the only certainty. By rethinking, reviewing, and reforming the strategies, the company manages to tackle the tricky waters and win.

Key takeaway 6: Develop bold middle-management

One of the major reasons behind the success and growth of Unilever has been its management, which doesn’t shy away from taking bold steps when needed. In addition to this, Unilever continues to invest in human capital and experiment as well as explore to stay a step ahead in the ever-evolving dynamic age.

Sustainable Living Plan – The Game-Changer For Business Growth

Seldom do businesses as large as Unilever get a chance to re-invent themselves and throw caution to the winds by taking the difficult long-term approach that can even negatively impact their bottom line.

In 2010, Unilever did just that by launching the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), pioneering a new business model. 

Playing their part in the environment

At the core of the plan lies Unilever's commitment to doing right by people and the planet with its purpose-driven ambition of halving its environmental footprint while doubling its size and making the world a better place for 8 billion people.

Fighting climate change by ending deforestation, ensuring food security by championing sustainable agriculture, and investing in water, safety, and hygiene to uplift people's lives, Unilever set the bar higher than ever before.

Has Unilever been successful in achieving its targets? You bet it has.

By pushing the company in a unique way, further than ever before, in its quest to build a sustainable and equitable future, Unilever has delighted all stakeholders, appealed to the masses, and showed how companies can lead from the front by taking a stand at issues that matter.

Following are some of the highlights of the USLP more than ten years after its launch depicting how Unilever has made an explicit positive contribution to address the key challenges:

• Reached over 1.2 billion worldwide with health and hygiene programs
• Lowered the environmental footprint per customer by one-thirds
• Reduced greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds
• Achieved 100% renewable grid electricity across all plants
• Achieved zero landfills across all factories
• Cut down on over €1 billion on costs by reducing waste and enhancing energy as well as water efficiency

"Brands with purpose grow; companies with purpose last; and people with purpose thrive."

Embedding sustainability into the business has yielded remarkable results for Unilever.

Unilever's purpose-led brands have contributed immensely to Unilever's growth in a day and age where sustainability has become mainstream as around two-thirds of consumers opt for a particular brand because of its stand on social issues, and more than 90% of millennials prefer brands that strive to elevate humanity. 

According to Unilever , its purpose-driven brands contribute to almost 75% of the company's growth and are growing 69% faster than the rest of the business, depicting that the huge bet has indeed paid off. 

While Unilever could have easily waited for consumers and governments worldwide to push it to embrace sustainability rather than do it all by itself – that too ahead of the time – it portrayed itself as the leader with the focus on the bigger picture which stands by its values and is not afraid to do the right thing even when the odds are stacked against it.

Key takeaway 7: Make sustainability part of your business strategy

Pioneering sustainability businesses, Unilever started a movement for social change in 2010 that helped it re-invent itself for good. It has paid off for the company, making customers fall head over heels for their brands.

Why is Unilever so successful?

Unilever is always in transition, equipping itself to continue making a difference well into the future. It isn’t perfect given its fair share of products that don’t seem sustainable or advertising campaigns that don’t go hand in hand with its values. However, it is a company on a big mission to transform the world, setting an example for the rest to follow.

Performance beyond expectations In challenging & uncertain circumstances

The year 2020 was volatile and unpredictable in ways more than one for all businesses operating around the globe. From supply chain bottlenecks to change in the way consumers shop and employees work, there were an array of disruptions, leading to an uncertain business environment.

Yet, in the face of such adversity, Unilever has stayed true to the values that have always made it a force to be reckoned with – resilience and agility – and hence, not only survived but also thrived. 

While underlying operating profit fell by 5.8% in 2020, the company experienced a boost in underlying sales growth of 1.9%. This can be mainly attributed to the company’s long-term planning, flexibility, and sustainable objectives.

Hence, where other companies focused on driving growth temporarily, Unilever developed their current and future strategies on sustainability and inclusiveness for growth. An example is their stronghold in emerging economies of China, India, and the USA, where they have always looked to include locals and contribute to society’s uplift.

Moreover, Unilever went ahead with a major shift in its legal structure in 2020 to stabilize and unify its operations worldwide. Formerly run by cross-border companies, Unilever NV and Unilever PLC, Unilever has consolidated itself into the single umbrella of Unilever PLC, becoming stronger than ever.

Below is a graph of Unilever's annual revenue in Euro Millions

Growth by the numbers

List of key strategic takeaways

• Impact-driven Businesses Succeed

Now more than ever, it has become difficult for companies to achieve a competitive advantage. So, what can a business do? Be relevant to society and offer a multi-stakeholder return, benefiting all and crafting real change. It definitely pays off.

• Always Be Proactive and Flexible

Change is the only certainty, so you need to embrace it. Your best bet is to be on the lookout for potential opportunities that present themselves from time to time and grab them with both hands. You can do that if you remain agile and act quickly.

• Prioritize Investing In Human Capital

Your single most important asset is your people. Empower them so that they can help you elevate your brand. Right from hiring the ‘right’ people to nurturing them, you need to continuously invest in human capital in order to achieve lasting success.

• Take Risks To Grow

You can only reach the top with iterative improvements made possible by continuous innovation and risk-taking. Keep experimenting, testing, and exploring: if you achieve the desired result, you win, if you don’t, you learn.

• Encourage Sustainable Living And Make It Effortless

Weave sustainability into your processes and value chains. From the raw material used to the packaging, make sure you use eco-friendly practices to add value to the lives of people. This way you can win consumer goodwill and trust.

• Stay Intune With The DNA Of Your Brand

In the quest to do more and become more, you can easily forget to stay true to your ultimate purpose. Go back to the drawing board whenever needed, regularly communicate your purpose to your target audience, and stand up for what you stand for to separate yourself from the rest.

Unilever’s journey from one soap brand with a handful of sales and customers to the leading multinational consumer goods company with billions of consumers worldwide has been incredible and offers a number of lessons, including:

While we don’t know what the future holds, we are pretty much certain that Unilever is here to stay and dominate, doing right by the people and planet.

Reimagining the employee experience

Understanding the challenges.

Unilever asked us for a vision for its employees globally – a world-class experience which would be dynamic and personalized.

Unilever saw an opportunity to simplify the way employees found information through its many processes, systems and content resources. They realized that such a change would also free up support agents’ time to focus on higher value human interactions.

To understand how the employees felt, we asked them directly. We conducted a qualitative study of one-to-one interviews with employees of all levels, across different markets.

Co-designing the vision

Using this valuable insight, Accenture worked collaboratively with Unilever to co-design their vision, including a Rumble™ that generated ideas to explore and develop. Our long-standing relationship with Unilever brought a deep understanding of their business, which, coupled with our service design approach, enabled the co-creation of a groundbreaking, real vision built on what mattered most to Unilever’s employees.

Unilever had articulated three core pillars that would inspire their new employee experience: human experiences, simple interactions, meaningful impact.

The “Employee Universe” was created to enable the vision, which comprised a matrix of interconnected components, fronted by a chatbot named Una. We created Una’s personality, and designed her human-like conversation to reinforce Unilever’s brand and values. Una becomes a personal assistant, guiding the employee to what they need in that moment. Her conversations were contextually relevant, and continuously improved through a built-in learning loop.

Test, learn and iterate

We ran a “Living Lab”, whereby we would rapidly test, assess and fine-tune throughout to ensure we maximized Una’s impact. We delivered a Proof of Value to demonstrate how new hires would feel about using AI chatbot technology to answer day-to-day queries and test and iterate the underpinning technology.

Employees who tested the pilot enjoyed their initial experience of using Una, giving her a rating of 4.6/5, and 85% employee satisfaction. Our vision and chatbot, plus Living Lab, became the foundation for a broader program of transforming the employee experience at Unilever.

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William R. Kerr

Related work.

• November 2020
• Faculty Research
• Unilever's Response to the Future of Work  By: William R. Kerr and Bailey McAfee
• Unilever's Response to the Future of Work  By: William R. Kerr, Emilie Billaud and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej

BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Case Study: A Vision for Unilever

In 2009, the multinational company Unilever adopted a new strategic vision that integrated societal and environmental responsibilities. The company's Sustainable Living Plan was the center of this strategy. This plan aims to help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing, decouple Unilever's growth from its environmental impact, increase its social impact, and enhance the livelihoods of all those involved in its supply chain. Read this chapter to discover how Unilever merged sustainability with profitable growth.

What steps did Unilever take to re-engineer the company and implement the Sustainable Living Plan successfully? How did sustainable innovation play a role in helping Unilever achieve its goals? What were the results?

Vision and Concept

Polman's vision for Unilever was rooted in the company's history. William Lever had always seen Lever Brothers as much more than a vehicle for making money for himself: he saw no trade-off between seeking to make a profit and seeking to improve society. Its products helped to improve public health and hygiene, and the company treated its employees with dignity and respect. After it became Unilever and grew into a multinational corporation, it continued to make everyday products and to treat its employees well. But when Polman took over, he decided to refashion Unilever so that social responsibility moved from an important facet of the company to become its driving force. He had always seen business as needing to play an important role in the development of a more just and equal society. 

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, other factors had to be taken into account: climate change, globalization, population growth, scarcer natural resources, greater individual wealth, an expanding middle class in both the developed and developing worlds, more informed and demanding customers, and more active shareholders.

An important response popular at the time to address this combination of factors was the philosophy of "frugal innovation", defined as the ability to do more with less, creating increased business and social value while minimizing the use of ever-diminishing resources. One way of doing so is to strip non-essential and unnecessary items out of everyday products, such as cars and mobile telephones, to make them cheaper and more available to the less affluent and to the ecologically aware. 

Paul Polman showed his commitment to this philosophy by writing the Foreword to the book Frugal Innovation: How To Do Better With Less, written by two pioneers of the concept, Navi Radjou, and Jaideep Prabhu, and published in 2015 by The Economist and Profile Books, London. He wrote: "The insatiable demand for ever higher quality products will continue to rise while at the same time the availability of the resources needed to satisfy that demand will remain constrained. Reconciling this apparent conflict is rapidly emerging as one of the biggest business challenges of our age". 

He concluded: "By combining the frugal ingenuity of developing nations with the advanced R&D [research and development] capabilities of advanced economies, companies can create high-quality products and services that are affordable, sustainable and benefit humanity".

In 2010, Unilever unveiled the new concept through which it would apply Polman's vision: its Sustainable Living Plan, which would be applied to every aspect of the company's operations, from top to bottom. Launching the plan, Polman summarized its ambitions: "We have to develop new ways of doing business which will increase the positive social benefits arising from Unilever's activities while at the same time reducing our environmental impacts. We want to be a sus tainable business in every sense of the word". But, he added, "We do not believe there is a conflict between sustainability and profitable growth".

In 2010, Unilever unveiled the new concept through which it would apply Polman's vision: its Sustainable Living Plan, applied to every aspect of the company's operations.

He outlined vision, strategy, and targets: "Our vision is to create a better future in which people can improve their quality of life without increasing their environmental footprint. Our strategy is to increase our social impact by ensuring that our products meet the needs of people everywhere for balanced nutri tion, good hygiene, and the confidence  which comes from having clean clothes and good skin.

"We recognise that, to live within the natural limits of the planet, we have to decouple growth from environmental impact. This starts with our own operations. We now send zero waste to landfill across our entire global factory network, cut CO2 from energy by 47% per tonne of production in our operations, many of our factories run on renewable energy and we'll be carbon positive by 2030. 

"However, our impact goes beyond our factory gates. The sustainable sourcing of raw materials and the use of our products by the consumer at home have a far larger footprint. That's why our plan is designed to reduce our impacts across the whole lifecycle of our products. Innovation and technology will be the key to achieving these reductions".

Polman announced three hugely ambitious targets as a part of the USLP: to help more than a billion people take action to improve their health and wellbeing by 2020; to decouple Unilever's growth from its environmental impact by 2030, achieving absolute reductions across the product lifecycle and halving its environmental footprint; and enhancing the livelihoods of "hundreds of thousands" of people involved in its supply chain by 2020.

Polman himself has always had a strong personal moral compass, stemming from his upbringing as one of the six children of a Catholic family in Enschede, Netherlands. As a teenager he considered becoming a priest and then a doctor before deciding on a business career. Just as importantly, he recognised that in the first decades of the twenty-first century a growing number of customers, both actual and potential, were becoming more concerned about the quality of life than mere consumerism and the pursuit of material things, and buying into the notion of sustainability. 

Polman told us: "Consumers are asking for it and citizens are asking for it. The circular economy and issues like climate change are becoming more and more relevant. People want to have food that is more natural or organic. People are moving from a concept of 'my world' to 'our world'. Millennials are more purpose-driven". That also applies to Unilever's own staff. "We have no problem attracting millennials: about 50 percent of the people who work for Unilever are millennials. And they want to make a difference in life. There is absolutely no question about it: they are an engine for change".

The other key element making sustainability possible is technology. "Technology has developed very rapidly and is opening up new possibilities. Electric vehicles are one example: very soon electric vehicles will be more popular than internal combustion engines. 

At Unilever we find that moving to zero waste in our factories and shifting to renewable energy makes economic sense. Increasingly data shows that companies operating more responsibly tend to perform better because they reflect the needs of society better. They probably set more realistic targets, they make more data public, which lowers the cost of capital, and so on.

"Implementing our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan is not that difficult, as long as we are all aligned on the direction we need to take and why it needs to be done. But what you need to focus on is the speed and skill of implementation.

"What we find is that our brands with a social purpose are an enormous engine for innovation. Our Sustainable Living Brands, as we call them, grow 70 percent faster than the rest of our portfo lio. An example is in water-scarce regions, such as parts of Africa, where rinsing out the soap suds from laundry accounts for around 70 percent of domestic water use.

"It is really the energy that comes from people in terms of having a meaning, having a purpose, that drives innovation".

With our Sunlight soap brand we developed a new anti-foam molecule called SmartFoam which breaks down suds more quickly. This reduces the amount of water needed, as well as speeding up the process of rinsing. People prefer that product, they see the multiple benefits, and the brand grows by addressing a societal problem.

"Take Domestos, or Domex as it is called in India, our toilet-cleaning product. If you just sell toilet-cleaning products, that is not a very exciting thing. But if you address open defecation, suddenly you start to innovate quite differently. For example, we have just launched the first small powder sachet, Domex Toilet Powder. The brand provides an affordable toilet-cleaning solution to consumers. And not surprisingly the brand is growing. 

"Or take Lifebuoy soap, with its mission to help a child reach the age of five. So far, we have reached 426 million people with handwashing behavior-change programmes in developing countries. We do that because we want to help enhance people's wellbeing, and at the same time the brand is growing very well. 

"But it also works in developed markets. Our compressed deodorant technology is a good example. Scientists at our R&D facility in Leeds, northern England, reengineered the spray system of our aerosols to reduce the flow rate. Using 50 percent less propellant gas and 25 percent less aluminum in the packaging, we have reduced the carbon footprint per can by about 25 percent. This also means that more cans can be transported at a time, resulting in a 35 percent reduction in the number of lorries on the road. We felt so strongly about it that we did not patent the technology to encourage wider industry use". 

How does the need for innovation fit into the broad framework of the Sustainable Living Plan?

"It starts as a broad purpose that aligns everybody in whichever  direction you want to take," Polman replied. "We have translated the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan into what we call a Compass, so everybody has the same true North. And in that Compass we look at winning with innovation, we look at winning in the marketplace, winning with people, and winning with continuous improvement, which we call efficiencies. But we want innovation running through all of these areas. 

"The packaging is up to 30% lighter and allows us to get 40% more product on a pallet, which means we could reduce the number of trucks on the road by 800 per year".

We provide the tools and we explain to  people what sort of objectives there are. Anything we do now in our innovation programme has to go through what we call the sustainability phenomenon. It has to be in line with the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.

"It is really the energy that comes from people in terms of having a meaning, having a purpose, having a contribution to life, that drives innovation. We spend one billion euros on R&D, we have 7,500 R&D professionals and 20,000 patents. But the global population is 7.6 billion. So, you need to have an open innovation system where you work together with everyone else to expand your consumer base and achieve wider success. For example, our top 15 suppliers are involved in about 50 percent of our innovations. 

"We have Unilever Ventures, our venture capital and private equity arm which invests in young and innovative companies to help accelerate their growth. Then there is our Unilever Foundry, where we help start-ups and social entrepreneurs scale up their ideas for greater positive impact. Unilever Foundry also enables our brands to collaborate and experiment with evolving technologies. And then our Mergers and Acquisitions strategy is geared to finding innovative brands like air purification company Blueair, or Seventh Generation, a cleaning products company in the US that thinks seven generations ahead. 

"Our M&A activity is for us an incubator for innovations as well. We are trying to find smaller companies and then make them bigger by leveraging our size and scale. But the main driver is the passion of our people. It cannot come from anywhere else. It is our people who go out there and want to make this a better world. They stay connected, they see what is needed. They see the challenges that consumers struggle with. It boils down to the people and their purpose.

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• August 17, 2023
• AI Case Studies

Case Study: Unilever’s Integration of AI in the Supply Chain

Unilever, a global leader in consumer goods, serves 3.4 billion daily consumers worldwide. The company has a robust manufacturing and distribution system, reaching customers across the globe through its global supplier base. With its commitment to responsible, sustainable innovation, Unilever aims to continue to serve consumers while minimizing environmental impact. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) within its supply chain and operations is one of Unilever’s strategies to achieve its goals.

Key Takeaways

• By leveraging AI in the supply chain, Unilever has been able to increase sales for retailers by 15-35%, creating an opportunity for targeted promotions and valuable market research.
• Unilever’s AI-driven approach has allowed for innovation in both vending machines and e-commerce applications, offering seamless experiences and energy-efficient solutions.
• Sustainability is at the core of Unilever’s use of AI in its supply chain, with groundbreaking technologies such as satellite imaging enhancing traceability and transparency, and driving towards a deforestation-free supply chain.
• Unilever’s collaboration with partners like Google Cloud and biotechnology specialists has enabled them to make substantial investments in commercialized plant-based alternatives and to detect environmental changes, contributing significantly to their sustainability goals.

Deep Dive: Unilever’s Integration of AI in the Supply Chain

Unilever’s approach to integrating AI into its supply chain focuses on sustainability, innovation, efficiency, and consumer responsiveness. Collaborating with partners like Google Cloud, the company seeks to create a 360-degree view of its supply chain while also driving new scientific discoveries to decrease emissions.

Implementation

Unilever implemented AI across different facets of its business. From incorporating image capture and AI technology within its freezers for seamless inventory management to using satellite imaging and AI to monitor farms and landscapes for better traceability. The company has also used machine learning technology to reformulate products like Cornetto ice creams, making them sustainable without changing the taste. A partnership with carbon recycling companies to manufacture greener chemicals for products like laundry detergents was another significant implementation.

The implementation of AI has led to increased sales for retailers, improved energy efficiency in ice cream cabinets, and allowed Unilever to predict areas at risk for deforestation. The utilization of machine learning and artificial intelligence has helped in rapid discovery, cutting the emissions in surfactants production by 82%, and enhancing efficiency across various stages of the supply chain.

Challenges and Barriers

Transitioning to AI-powered processes wasn’t without challenges. Balancing the power consumption of the AI technologies, recreating products to be more environmentally friendly, and ensuring alignment with sustainability targets required significant efforts. Collaboration with various external partners and aligning with internal departments were also complex tasks that needed careful planning and execution.

Future Outlook

Unilever’s investment in AI signifies a commitment to continuous innovation and sustainability. The company aims to explore further solutions, including blockchain, for traceability, crowdsourcing pilots for visibility into unseen parts of the supply chain, and further research into plant-based alternatives. The path forward is marked by increased collaboration with specialist start-ups, firms, and academia to enhance products and processes.

Unilever’s integration of AI in its supply chain showcases a forward-thinking approach to harnessing technology for sustainable growth. Through concerted efforts, strategic partnerships, and commitment to innovation, Unilever has set a noteworthy example in leveraging AI to create tangible benefits for consumers, retailers, and the planet. The company’s journey offers valuable insights and lessons for other organizations aiming to align technological advancements with sustainability goals.

Sources: How Unilever is using AI to make its products more sustainable Unilever’s ‘Groundbreaking’ Supply Chain Investments Lean Into AI and Geolocation How Unilever Is Transforming Ice Cream With AI How AI and digital help us innovate faster and smarter Multinationals turn to generative AI to manage supply chains

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Valuing your talent: Unilever

Case study on leading people authentically

Unilever’s Senior Vice President of Leadership and Organisational Development, Leena Nair, describes their HR vision – People, Place, Performance – and how people measures are helping to secure the top talent, make Unilever the best place to work, and ensure their people are performing to their productive best.

In the face of stark competition Unilever have been using their people measures to increase the impact of their recruitment activities and analyse the success of their employer branding and measure and improve the effectiveness of their organisation.

• Coming to terms with a VUCA world
• Doing well by doing good

People, place and performance: a new social analytics?

• People: future-proofing
• Place: branding the employee value proposition
• Performance: gauging traction

Podcast interview with James Stringer: Director, HR Information, Unilever

Large corporations with long historical legacies are increasingly unfashionable. According to one recent and influential book, those companies approaching $40 billion are at risk of hitting a ‘stall point’ from which three out of four never fully recover. 1 Many would say it is typical of the ‘Polman era’ that just as Unilever is approaching the ‘danger zone’ of where research indicates most companies stall, the influential CEO of Unilever should set a target of doubling revenues to 80 billion euros.

The focus on improvement under Polman has been unrelenting: first, a focus on leadership; then the birth of the ‘Compass Strategy’ underpinned by the ‘Unilever Sustainable Living Plan’, where new alternative operating models were sought to avoid just taking from society and the environment; followed by the ‘turbo-charging’ of the business underpinned by making more strategic choices and a new organisational structure; with the current focus now on ensuring the organisation is fit and agile in order to double the size of revenues.

Coming to terms with a VUCA   world

According to Unilever, all this is taking place against anything but predictable conditions, with the company identifying three ‘mega-trends’ all worthy of our attention: the end of conventional capitalism and the shift to a more sustainable version of capitalism brought about by the recognition that there was and is a crisis of ethics, reflected in and probably the root cause of the financial crisis leading to the over- gearing of our economy and of our planet; second, an increasing distrust of governments and large organisations on the scale such as Unilever; which, third, has led to consumers demanding change much faster than large companies can deliver it. Doug Baillie, Chief Human Resources Officer, explains:

‘In Unilever we call this the ‘VUCA’ world, which is a phrase that comes from the American army. It means the world we live in is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complicated and ambiguous. This has become the new normal. I would go as far as to suggest that if you had stable economies and stable currencies, we wouldn’t know what to do anymore because we are so used to the turmoil we now live in.’

Doing well by doing good     

What makes Unilever interesting is their highly distinctive response to tackling the problems of the global economy head on. Baillie continues:

‘Our response to this is interesting. Fundamentally, we can no longer be spectators in the world. We have got to be part of the solution. We can no longer look at the communities and societies in which we operate by taking things out of them in order to grow our businesses profitably and sustainably. We should be saying what can we put into our communities and the societies we serve in order to grow our businesses more sustainably and profitably to ensure we become part of the solution? So you have to do “more than” – which is more than run a business for shareholder value. When Paul came in he started doing quite dramatic things. We no longer give guidance. We only report profit every six months – we are running the business for the long term. Consistent, sustainable profit and growth is the metric we talk about.’

These are audacious plans. Not only is revenue set to double, but for a business whose products are used by 2 billion people across the globe each day, a new goal lies in decoupling growth from the impact the business has on the environment and the reduction of the footprint on sustainability by making a difference to more than a billion people in the world through social impact. This is not a branding exercise but at the heart of what Unilever stands for. As Baillie was anxious to clarify:

‘This is our business model: it’s called the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. It’s not a CSR initiative. It’s how we run the business. Everything we do, every single part of our business goes through the sustainability lens and we drive the business through that and it touches every part of the business.'

How well?     

Of course, we have been here before. Many a company has tried to hose itself down in environmental colours only to be later exposed as doing no more than ‘greenwashing’ where the operational reality underneath has been found somewhat short of the environmental rhetoric. It is here where an analytical approach has helped Unilever to reach a new level of transparency both internally and externally on both a corporate and people-based level.

In terms of the corporate paybacks, Unilever has been unequivocal in publicly stating its targets and reporting traction against them.

‘The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan has three big goals: to improve health and well-being, reduce environmental impact and enhance livelihoods. Supporting these goals are nine commitments underpinned by targets spanning our social, environmental and economic performance across the value chain. We produced an integrated annual report this year, so we not only did the financial numbers but we put all of it together in one report.’

It is with Unilever’s talent strategy where the Compass Strategy really appears to be paying dividends for the company. This defines the point at which the company is integrating its Compass Strategy and Sustainable Living Plan with underpinning talent interventions.

According to Leena Nair, Senior Vice President of Leadership and Organisation Development, Unilever’s HR vision calls it ‘People, Place and Performance.’ This essentially represents a three-fold challenge around how Unilever secures the best talent; how to make Unilever the best place to work; and ensuring people are performing to their productive best:

‘Are they being engaged and is all of their potential being unleashed?’

People: future-proofing      

There is an unrelenting analytical eye cast on the business through current, three year and five year lenses. The question under analysis, however, is always the same, as Nair outlines:

‘We have spent an enormous amount of time examining whether we have the talent engine to sustain an 80 billion euro revenue business. There is a significant amount of talent analytics done around the kinds of people we have, the quality, quantity, where the gaps are, how we’re going to close the gap, etc. We track and see how we are doing across all of these areas. We examine the skills, talent and culture to see if we have what it takes to be the 80 billion euro business we want to be. This is one of the essential roles HR plays in the business by ensuring any gaps in the skills, talent or culture across the business that might harm our 80 billion euro aspirations are covered. It’s all about three years from now; five years from now. We are future-proofing the business.'

Place: branding the employee   value proposition

A second element outlined by Nair turns on the detailed and extensive work being undertaken in the new social media analytical space to ensure the development of the company’s employee value proposition.

‘Our model is one of 70% of our talent is “built” and the other 30% is “buy-in”. We are a very marketing oriented business so our marketing expertise is leveraged to help build our employee brand in terms of it being a great place to work, with great people to work with, a winning business with sustainability at its heart.’

A new ‘authentic leadership’ programme with an unrelenting focus on ensuring the talent under development is aligned with the future strategy and underpinning business model of Unilever is also in place.

But a global business operating in 190 countries throughout the world needs a highly diversified marketing strategy and talent, too, is incorporated into a sophisticated approach to brand development. Using analytics helps Unilever to sense-check their messages in different marketplaces while maintaining the same underlining value proposition underpinning the organisation’s overarching brand:

‘We have broadly the same story which we activate it in all of our markets. But we activate our story in different ways by making it relevant to where they are located. The core of the brand remains the same but we activate it in line with all the local nuances we have.’

Of course this is where the power and scale of a company like Unilever comes to the fore. By gathering data across the stated preferences of potential employees, mapping these against the movements and activities of potential recruits on the webpages of Unilever’s competitors, the company has built up an unrivalled talent-branding machine that enables it to position its employee value proposition across the 290 million users currently registered on LinkedIn:

‘We recruit about 850 graduates at any one time from around 45 markets into our Unilever Future Leaders Program and we are in the top three employers in 37 countries and the number one employer of choice in 28 countries at the moment. In 2009 this was just three. This is not an internal survey but one done by an external provider across 60,000 graduates and is fully audited. We look at the quality of the hire and we look at the attractiveness of the brand, which again is very measurable.’

Branding, of course, is second nature to a fast-moving consumer goods-oriented business like Unilever.

Baillie illustrates how Unilever views the importance of the synergy between branding and people in the story he told us about how, as an executive who used to head up the European arm of the business and with no prior experience in HR, his CEO convinced him of the strategic importance of an effective human capital strategy merged with the powerful brands owned by Unilever:

‘Paul sat me down and said: “we’re in the business of brands and innovation – delighting the consumer every day; and it’s about people. The two assets we have are brands and innovation; and people. And all of the other elements, such as the execution, efficiencies, fall behind this. You can have the best strategies in the world, but unless you get your people agenda right, you’re not going to make it work effectively.'

And, of course, that was quite appealing to me. My own personal view is that as you look forward into the next 10 or 20 years, the position of the CHRO will become more and more strategic, and more and more important around that boardroom table because you are talking about all of those issues around that VUCA world and the people agenda of this is never going to return to “normal”: this is how it is. It’s almost a level playing field in terms of innovation and technology. It’s the people that apply that innovation and technology that makes the difference. And he said to me, “Those are the assets: brands and people – simple.” So that’s what persuaded me to step over: Get the people agenda right.’  

Performance: gauging traction      

The huge volumes of data collated by Unilever are fed into the ongoing process of evaluating the talent of the current workforce. As Nair outlines:

‘We look at the skills you have now and the skills you need three years from now, so we are really future-proofing the business. We look at the skills Anthony has in terms of the services he provides, and then as a function we examine what we need to cover. We look at an entire function as well as the individual. There are individual skill assessments, collective skills assessments which map out individual gaps and collective gaps. This is how we bridge the gap between where we want to be three years from now and where we are today. We have a one-page plan for every area of the business. Clearly some parts of the business need this more than others.’

Baillie sees this level of analytics and their role in formulating and aligning the human capital strategy of the business with the overarching strategies of the business as a whole as a distinctive strength.

‘The power of this is that it starts with the country and the category strategy in each country, so you walk out with an HR strategy plan that drives the business. It’s the best tool I’ve seen as a business guy. Here’s the company strategy, here’s the category strategy, and here’s the HR strategy.’

Interestingly, when challenged how Baillie knows his interventions work, he makes three powerful observations. Each relates to the Valuing your Talent Framework in very precise ways. The first starts with the outcomes, or what Baillie refers to as the ‘macro or big picture’:

‘First, if you take the very macro big picture, it says, “Wow! The business has gone through a trajectory from 3–4% growth to 6–8% growth.” The profit is growing and the cash is growing – all of the key financial metrics are going in the right direction and you have definitely seen a step up in Unilever. You have seen a re-evaluation in terms of its share price – and our total shareholder return has been at 98% over the last three to five years.’

The second is more complex in terms of establishing the role of talent inputs in shaping the performance of the business. Nevertheless, Baillie is convinced views in the investment community are changing:

‘You’ve also seen, and this is the more qualitative, if you start following some of the analysts, the clever analysts – I actually did part of the IR Roadshow in my first year as CHRO, which caused quite a stir. I knew a lot of them because I’d run Europe as my last job and I was actually going out to discuss the performance we had in Europe. The really smart analysts spent 10 minutes talking to me about our business results and spend 40–50 minutes talking about people. I know analysts with models of leadership capability and on those we have shifted to having one of the strongest leadership teams. I take their qualitative judgements as evidence that ideas we have implemented are paying off in terms of investments. There are not a lot of analysts who go out and talk about people. But when I did that roadshow, maybe two out of the six or eight spent quite a bit of time on the people agenda and not spending time filling in the spreadsheet, and some wanted to talk about our performance culture, how we reward people, our leadership development programme, our branding, and so forth, so that was quite encouraging when you started to see that. So they would be the two qualitative ones that we look at. The analytics we would look at would be things such as productivity per employee, headcount, those types of things to say, is this organisation becoming more effective?’

The third justification, again difficult to capture analytically, turns on the improvement in the asset we call talent. Baillie again had another powerful story to outline the impact of his team’s activities and the outputs generated in terms of the depth and breadth in the quality of the composition of the workforce:

‘Are we further down the road? How do we quantify it? If you look at it in terms of shift on our balance sheet, you can look at it in terms of churn. Attrition is one of the metrics we look at. Our attrition has been lower than the rest of the markets for the last three years. So, that’s a good sign because it means we are keeping our people, and getting a better return from our investment. We also know that our people are highly engaged. Our employee engagement continues to rise, and in the last five years, we have seen an increase of 1,000 basis points157. Our valuable people are staying and they are engaged, and these are leading indicators of business performance.’

In this interview, James tells us Unilever’s data story, starting around seven years ago when the HR function was globalised. With a new HR operating framework, and a single system in place for all 104 countries, it was important that they also had global definitions and people metrics. As James explains, doing this put them in a very strong position – it ‘opened up the power of information’.

James tells us about the 78 core HR metrics that Unilever collects about every employee, and then about additional data such as talent management information, and people survey data. They’ve got to the stage where ‘doubting of the data is off the agenda’, and people no longer challenge HR figures and information: "To be able to know what’s happening where, anywhere in the world in Unilever, with three or four years of history on our systems, is quite amazing."

Listen to the interview below:

Duration: 10:20

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More From Forbes

The amazing ways how unilever uses artificial intelligence to recruit & train thousands of employees.

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It’s hard to live a day in the developed world without using a Unilever product. The multinational manufactures and distributes over 400 consumer goods brands covering food and beverages, domestic cleaning products and personal hygiene.

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With so many processes to coordinate and manage, artificial intelligence is quickly becoming essential for organizations of its scale. This applies to both research and development as well as the huge support infrastructure needed for a business with 170,000 employees.

Recently it announced that it had developed machine learning algorithms capable of sniffing your armpit and telling you whether you are suffering from body odors. While this may seem like "using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut," the technology which has been developed could well go on to be used to monitor food for freshness, helping to solve the problem of food overproduction and waste endemic in society .

As well as these smart, public-facing initiatives, though, artificial intelligence is being put to use behind the scenes to help screen and assess the more than one million people per year who apply for jobs with Unilever. If they make the grade and become one of the thousands who are offered a job, they have AI-powered tools to help them adjust to their new role and hit the ground running.

AI-enhanced recruiting

Unilever recruits more than 30,000 people a year and processes around 1.8 million job applications.

This takes a tremendous amount of time and resources. As a multinational brand operating in 190 countries, applicants are based all around the world. Finding the right people is an essential ingredient for success, and Unilever can't afford to overlook talent just because it is buried at the bottom of a pile of CVs.

To tackle this problem, Unilever partnered with Pymetrics, a specialist in AI recruitment, to create an online platform, which means candidates can be initially assessed from their own homes, in front of a computer or mobile phone screen.

First, they are asked to play a selection of games that test their aptitude, logic, and reasoning, and appetite for risk. Machine learning algorithms are then used to assess their suitability for whatever role they have applied for, by matching their profiles against those of previously successful employees.

The second stage of the process involves submitting a video interview. Again, the assessor is not a human being but a machine learning algorithm. The algorithm examines the videos of candidates who answering questions for around 30 minutes, and through a mixture of natural language processing and body language analysis, determines who is likely to be a good fit.

Unilever's chief of HR, Leena Nair, told me that around 70,000 person-hours of interviewing and assessing candidates had been cut, thanks to the automated screening system.

She said, "We look for people with a sense of purpose – systemic thinking, resilience, business acumen. Based on that profile, the games and the video interview are all programmed to look for cues in their behavior that will help us understand who will fit in at Unilever."

Referring to the video interview analytics for their future leaders program, she tells me: “Every screenshot gives us many data points about the person, so we work with a number of partners and use a lot of proprietary technology with those partners, and then we select 3,500 or so people to go through to our discovery center.” After spending a day with real leaders and recruiters, Unilever selects about 800 people who will be offered a job.

The system is also designed to give feedback to all applicants, even those who aren’t successful.

“What I like about the process is that each and every person who applies to us gets some feedback,” Nair says.

“Normally when people send an application to a large company it can go into a ‘black hole’ – thank you very much for your CV, we’ll get back to you – and you never hear from them again.

“All of our applicants get a couple of pages of feedback, how they did in the game, how they did in the video interviews, what characteristics they have that fit, and if they don’t fit, the reason why they didn’t, and what we think they should do to be successful in a future application.

“It’s an example of artificial intelligence allowing us to be more human.”

So while Unilever isn’t quite ready to hand the entire recruitment process over to machines just yet, it has shown that it can assist with the initial “sift” when it comes to preliminary screening of applicants.

Robots to help you settle into the job

After making the grade, another machine-learning-driven initiative is helping new employees get started in their new roles – adapting to the day-to-day routines as well as the corporate culture at the business.

Unabot is a natural language processing (NLP) bot built on Microsoft’s Bot framework, designed to understand what employees need to know and fetch information for them when it is asked.

“We joke about the fact we don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman – it’s Unabot,” Nair tells me.

“Unabot doesn’t only answer HR questions, questions about anything that affects employees should be answered by Unabot, and it is now the front face for any employee question – they might ask it about IT systems, or about their allowances – so we are learning about what matters to employees in real time.”

Through interacting with employees, Unabot has learned to answer questions such as where parking is available, the timing of shuttle buses, and when annual salary reviews are due to take place.

Unlike, for example, Alexa or consumer-facing, customer-service corporate chatbots, Unabot must also be able to filter and apply information based on who it is speaking to. It is capable of differentiating the information it passes on based on both the user's geographical location and their level of seniority within the company.

Unabot was first rolled out for employees based in the Philippines and is now operating in 36 countries. It has been selected as the next AI initiative that will be rolled out globally in all of Unilever’s 190 markets.

“It’s a new way of working,” Nair tells me, “We never go in and say it's perfect so let’s roll it out in all countries,’ we learn what we can in one country and roll it out in the next one.”

Currently, all of its data comes from internal sources, such as company guidelines, schedules, policy documents and questions asked by the employees themselves. In the future, this could be expanded to include external data such as learning materials.

And although it’s early days, the initial analysis seems to show that the initiative is popular with staff – with 36% of those in areas where it is deployed having used it at least once, and around 80% going on to use it again.

One lesson learned early on was that the importance of providing a frictionless experience.

“So we’ve learned that you have to make anything that interacts with employees or consumers effortless,” Nair says.

“People interact in different ways – a policy document is written in a particular way, its three or four pages of what an employee shouldn’t do. But an employee tends to ask questions in very simplistic ways – how does this impact my life, where will I find this, what can I do?”

Machine learning – particularly NLP – can overcome this due to its ability to detect which questions are repeatedly asked, even if they are asked in different ways, and present the right information.

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Unilever Five Forces Analysis (Porter Model) & Recommendations

This Five Forces analysis of Unilever shows the need to strategically prioritize competition and the bargaining power of customers in the multinational consumer goods company’s industry environment. Michael Porter’s Five Forces Analysis model is a management tool for understanding the impacts of external factors in a company’s competitive environment. In this Five Forces analysis of Unilever, competitive rivalry is viewed as one of the strongest external forces, along with the bargaining power of buyers. To ensure long-term success, the company must address the issues related to these forces. Unilever’s market position and organizational strengths are adequate to address such forces.

This Five Forces analysis of Unilever identifies competition and consumers as the most important forces. The external factors related to these forces impact the company’s financial performance in the consumer goods market. Thus, the competitive environment described in this Five Forces analysis influences the achievement of business goals linked to Unilever’s mission statement and vision statement .

Summary: Five Forces Analysis of Unilever

Unilever deals with a wide variety of external factors, considering the extent of its operations in the global consumer goods market. However, as shown in this Five Forces analysis, such external factors lead to variations in the intensities of the five forces impacting the business. The following are the intensities of the five forces affecting Unilever:

• Competitive rivalry or competition: Strong force
• Bargaining power of buyers or customers: Strong force
• Bargaining power of suppliers: Moderate force
• Threat of substitutes or substitution: Weak force
• Threat of new entrants or new entry: Weak force

This Five Forces analysis highlights competitive rivalry and the bargaining power of buyers as the issues of highest intensity affecting Unilever’s business. The bargaining power of suppliers is also important but has limited impact on the company. The threats of substitutes and new entry have a limited effect on Unilever and the consumer goods industry environment. In this regard, strategic action must prioritize competition and the bargaining power of customers. A recommendation is for Unilever to further build its competitive advantages through product innovation. For example, the company can increase its investment to produce better and more competitive variants of its current personal care and home care products. This effort should reflect Unilever’s generic competitive strategy and intensive growth strategies , which emphasize product uniqueness as a strategic approach. It is also recommended that the company enhance its customer relations to attract and retain more consumers. For example, in applying Unilever’s organizational culture in customer relations processes, higher quality in the processing of requests and complaints can improve consumers’ perception on the company and its brands. The company has the strengths needed to strategically address these issues, as discussed in the SWOT analysis of Unilever .

Competitive Rivalry or Competition with Unilever (Strong Force)

Competition is a major force in Unilever’s industry. This section of the Five Forces analysis identifies the external factors that present the impact of firms on each other. The strong force of competitive rivalry against Unilever is based on the following external factors and their intensities:

• High number of firms (strong force)
• High aggressiveness of firms (strong force)
• Low switching costs for consumers (strong force)

There are many competitors operating in the consumer goods industry, including Procter & Gamble (P&G) and PepsiCo . This external factor imposes a strong force on Unilever. In addition, these firms are generally aggressive, further adding to the intensity of competition. Unilever also experiences tough competition because of low switching costs. For example, it is easy for consumers to switch from one consumer goods company to another. Thus, a high level of competition is shown in this section of the Five Forces analysis, highlighting the need to consider competitive rivalry as a high-priority force in Unilever’s industry environment.

Bargaining Power of Unilever’s Customers/Buyers (Strong Force)

Unilever’s business and industry depend on the response of consumers to its products. The influence of buyers on business performance is considered in this section of the Five Forces analysis. Unilever must address the following external factors that lead to the strong force of the bargaining power of customers:

• Low switching costs (strong force)
• High quality of information (strong force)
• Small size of individual buyers (weak force)

The low switching costs make it easy for consumers to transfer from Unilever’s products to other companies’ products. This external factor contributes to the strong intensity of the bargaining power of buyers. In addition, consumers have access to high-quality information about consumer goods, making it even easier for them to decide when transferring from Unilever to other providers. For example, buyers can compare products based on online information. Moreover, the small size of an individual consumer’s purchases has minimal impact on Unilever’s profits. However, the low switching costs and high quality of information outweigh this third external factor in the industry environment. Based on this section of the Five Forces analysis, the bargaining power of customers is one of the strongest forces affecting the consumer goods business. Unilever’s marketing mix (4Ps) influences customer perception and contributes to the company’s effectiveness in managing the buyer power determined in this Five Forces analysis.

Bargaining Power of Unilever’s Suppliers (Moderate Force)

Suppliers impact Unilever’s industry environment by affecting the level of supply available to firms. This section of the Five Forces analysis presents the influence of suppliers on companies. The following are the external factors that contribute to the moderate force of the bargaining power of suppliers on Unilever:

• Moderate size of individual suppliers (moderate force)
• Moderate population of suppliers (moderate force)
• Moderate overall supply (moderate force)

While Unilever has large suppliers, like foreign firms that supply paper and oil, the average supplier is moderate in size. This external factor imposes a moderate-intensity force on the consumer goods industry environment. In addition, the moderate population of suppliers enables them to impose significant but limited influence on Unilever. Similarly, the moderate level of the overall supply adds to such a significant but limited influence of suppliers. For example, any supplier’s change in production levels leads to a significant but limited change in the availability of materials used in Unilever’s business. Other firms in the industry are similarly affected. As shown in this section of the Five Forces analysis of Unilever, the bargaining power of suppliers is a significant but moderate consideration in the consumer goods industry environment. The approaches used in Unilever’s operations management , particularly for supply chain management, help address the supplier power determined in this Five Forces analysis.

Threat of Substitutes or Substitution (Weak Force)

Substitutes can reduce Unilever’s revenues and the competitive strength of the company in the consumer goods industry. The impact of substitution is determined in this section of the Five Forces analysis. In Unilever’s case, the following external factors are responsible for the weak force of the threat of substitution:

• Low substitute availability (weak force)
• Low performance to price ratio of substitutes (weak force)

The low switching costs enable consumers to easily use substitutes instead of Unilever’s products. This external factor imposes a strong force on the company and the consumer goods industry environment. However, the overall impact of substitution is weakened because of the low availability of substitutes. For example, it is easier to access Unilever’s toothpaste from grocery stores than to obtain substitutes, like homemade organic dentifrices. In relation, most substitutes have low performance levels and a minimal or insignificant cost difference when compared to mass-produced consumer goods readily available in the market. This condition makes Unilever’s products more attractive than substitutes, thereby further weakening the intensity of the threat of substitution. This section of the Five Forces analysis of Unilever shows that the threat of substitutes is a minor business issue.

Threat of New Entrants or New Entry (Weak Force)

Unilever competes with established firms and new firms in the consumer goods market. This section of the Five Forces analysis considers the influence of new firms on the industry environment. The following external factors create the weak force of the threat of new entrants against Unilever:

• High cost of brand development (weak force)
• High economies of scale (weak force)

The low switching costs enable new entrants to impose a strong force against Unilever. For example, consumers can easily decide to try new products from new firms. However, it is costly to build strong brands, like Unilever’s. This external factor weakens the intensity of the threat of new entrants against the company. Also, Unilever takes advantage of high economies of scale, which support competitive pricing and high organizational efficiencies that new firms typically lack. As a result, the company remains strong despite new entrants. Based on this section of the Five Forces analysis, the threat of new entry is a minor concern in Unilever’s industry environment.

• Kostetska, N. (2022). M. Porter’s Five Forces model as a tool for industrial markets analysis. Innovative Economy , (4), 131-135.
• U.S. Department of Commerce – International Trade Administration – Consumer Goods Industry .
• Unilever PLC – Form 20-F .
• Unilever PLC – Our Strategy .
• Unilever PLC – Suppliers .
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Consumer Packaged Goods

Unilever sees 150% increase in intent to purchase with UGC

Unilever sets the bar for user-generated content (UGC) success with a company-wide strategy for making the most of the voice of the customer.

At a Glance

Get more value from UGC.

Look beyond marketing impact to use UGC strategically across the business.

Increase revenue, loyalty, search traffic, customer insights, and product quality.

Purchase intent lift

Interaction with reviews drove a 150% increase in intent to purchase on SimpleSkincare.com

5 ways Unilever maximizes the power of UGC to drive purchase intent, search conversion, and innovation

With more than 400 brands across over 190 countries, Unilever is one of the largest customer products companies in the world. Its innovative use of user-generated content (UGC) goes beyond marketing. Here’s how the brand leverages Bazaarvoice solutions to build loyalty and improve customer satisfaction.

1. Review volume is the foundation of UGC success

Unilever knows firsthand the benefits of UGC.

“Reviews instill a lot of trust among consumers and give them the confidence to make a purchase,” says Jenna Spivak Evans, Innovation and Digital Capabilities Manager at Unilever.

For example, customers who read reviews on the Simple Skincare website have a 150% greater intent to purchase and use the store locator feature.

And more reviews mean better results.

“We see a positive correlation between review volume and number of orders,” says Evans. “Increasing review volume can be as simple as asking yourself, ‘How am I already talking to my customers, what communications do I already have planned, and how can I layer on an ask for a review?’ It’s all about integrating your efforts into conversations you’re already having with consumers.” This approach is also cost-effective because it leverages existing investments. Unilever encourages reviews at multiple touchpoints, from emails to web banners to social media.

Bazaarvoice-powered sampling campaigns are another effective tactic: a recent campaign for Suave generated 5,000 reviews alone, and samples have driven hundreds of thousands of reviews across Unilever brands.

2. Recognizing UGC value beyond conversion

UGC is part of Unilever’s overall brand and marketing strategy. For example, it helps build organic search traffic and engagement.

“Because UGC delivers such rich content, you can see increases in search traffic of 15–25% as a result of using customer-generated content,” says Evans. “You will also see increases in website engagement metrics such as product page views per visit, average time spent onsite, and return-visitor rate.”

Online UGC also influences offline sales. Customers read online reviews before—and during—store visits, building loyalty and engagement throughout the customer journey.

3. Listening to customers and giving them what they want

Unilever acts on reviews to improve products and enhance the customer experience.

“Getting customer feedback provides an ongoing way to gather information about how a product is doing and where there’s room for improvement,” says Evans, who points to an example from the TRESemmé brand.

Reviewers of TRESemmé Keratin Smooth hair care mentioned using a dry shampoo the next day to maintain results—but Unilever had no Keratin Smooth dry shampoo. Unilever used this insight as an opportunity to promote other dry shampoos in its product lines alongside the Keratin Smooth shampoo.

4. Amplifying the voice of the customer

No matter how well a brand crafts its marketing content, it’s never as compelling as consumer content.

“Consumers really need a third party to legitimize the content they read on product detail pages,” according to Evans. “They see reviews as a trusted source for understanding how other consumers like them have experienced the product.”

Unilever’s own research reports that nearly half of shoppers trust user-generated text, video, and images more than brand-created content. In fact, consumers agreed that communication leveraging a review made them trust the Simple Skincare advertisement 38% more than when the same content was framed as a corporate claim.

“When we include reviews in social ads and display ads, we see about a 20–30% improvement in performance,” says Evans. “We also find that those customers are more likely to read other customer reviews of the product when they click through the product detail page.”

Unilever also uses UGC in print ads, inserts, and in-store displays.

5. Broadening the impact of UGC across the larger business

Unilever listens to the voice of the customer in reviews and responds proactively.

“All that customer feedback can provide an ongoing panel for informing R&D, customer service, quality teams, and others about how a product is performing,” says Evans.

In one case, the marketing department identified a trend of complaints about a reformulated product. The quality control department traced the issue to a bad batch, and Unilever provided a replacement to all customers who had reported an issue—along with information about the benefits of the reformulation.

The company is also integrating reviews with CRM for increased personalization.

“Integration of UGC into CRM will give us deeper demographic information and provide an incremental way to understand different customers’ needs,” says Evans.

It’s all part of Unilever’s never-ending quest to make products that people love so much that they want to share their experiences with the world.

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About the company

Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of food, home and personal care products, with more than 400 brands in over 190 countries reaching two billion customers a day. It has 172,000 employees and generated sales of 53.3 billion in 2015. Over half (57%) of the company footprint is in developing and emerging markets.

Client since 2013

Reviews instill a lot of trust among consumers and give them the confidence to make a purchase.

Jenna Spivak Evans

Innovation and Digital Capabilities Manager

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