Unilever’s Pimenta: Brand purpose matters
Asked what drives their brand preference, 80% of millennials are highly influenced by a brand’s potential to make the world a better place and want to do business with these brands.
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“That’s why brand purpose matters,” said Ricardo Pimenta, global brand VP of Unilever. “The way to make it work is to put [that purpose] at the very core of your strategy, not with extra dollars or a summer internship project. Find something that has a real impact in the world — don’t make it up. Use something people have a visceral reaction to, that’s relevant to your target audience, and that the people you serve really care about. Then find the angle that only you can bring to the table. That’s what’s going to make your brand stand out in the conversation and is going to make you transparent, honest and ‘B.S.’-free, because otherwise ... anyone under 30 will call you out.”
Such is the approach Unilever began to take with its Lifebuoy soap brand, a leader in its category in Asia, after becoming aware of some sobering statistics: Every year, as many as 2 million children die as a result of complications from diarrhea-related illness — about four children every minute. However, hand-washing with soap can reduce the risk of contracting diarrhea-related disease by 46%, making this practice the most effective public health intervention against illness tied to diarrhea.
Pimenta conceded that “hand-washing with soap programs” are neither new, nor “rocket science,” but emphasized that what Unilever has done differently when it comes to Lifebuoy is putting hand-washing with soap at the center of major social change. “We’re not selling soap anymore; we’re saving lives,” he said. “We re-framed our R&D, our engagement programs to focus around that and moved our business model from just selling soap to helping to save people’s lives.”
Through the program, Unilever has reached hundreds of millions with its message of the critical importance of hand-washing with soap and water in preventing disease and lowering child mortality rates. To help tell the story, the company created a series of You-Tube videos to help spread awareness. Pimenta shared the first video in the series, “Gondappa’s Story,” which follows a father’s journey through his village — walking on his hands — to celebrate his son’s fifth birthday. The video has had more than 19 million views on YouTube.
Beyond simply raising awareness, the program has had real results. In Thesgora, India, which had one of the highest rates of diarrhea among children in the world, Unilever helped reduce incidence of the disease from 36% to 5%. In addition to Thesgora, the company is working in towns and villages in 17 other countries to bring its “hand-washing saves lives” message.
Unilever is doing the same with Vaseline, digging deep down into the product’s heritage and following the best practice of finding, as Pimenta put it, “a cause and a topic that only” its own brand “can actually help with.” Two years ago, Pimenta read an article in the Washington Post about two dermatologists who had traveled to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan and found themselves unable, because of a lack of the proper product, to help heal the deep cracks in the feet of a refugee who needed to be able to walk so that he could get a job and feed his family. Vaseline had been “discovered” in 1859, when a British chemist named Robert Chesebrough observed oilmen smearing residue from a byproduct of the oil drilling process to successfully treat their cuts and burns.
“We were immediately compelled by this story to find what difference we could make, how we could help heal in a broader way, people’s skin, and we called those two doctors the same day. They helped us to craft what became the Vaseline Healing Project,” Pimenta recalled. The Vaseline Healing Project is based on a three-pronged program that involves distributing Vaseline to individuals around the world who need it most (more than 1 million Vaseline products were distributed last year in areas affected by crisis, disaster and displacement); sending more medical healing missions to affected areas; and training local medical personnel and health workers to recognize skin issues that are elevated in situations of crisis and disaster.
Leveraging a partnership with DirectRelief, an organization that distributes medicine and medical equipment to health clinics around the United States and has an outreach in more than 70 countries, Unilever, through the Vaseline Healing Project, provides health workers and patients with Vaseline products to use and distribute. Consumers can get involved by using a virtual relief kit builder on the Vaseline.com/theHealingProject website.
Pimenta noted that brands with a purpose have a business benefit and a social benefit, adding that another Unilever brand, Dove, has “done an amazing job” of fostering self-esteem among women. “There’s also an employee morale impact,” he concluded. “You just attract better people — people who want to be part of the journey and are willing to go the extra mile beyond their sales targets.”