[MUSIC] I'm here with Keith Weed, the Global CMO of Unilever. It's a brand with, a brand doesn't corporation but you have many brands that you trade under. Before we go into how does one manages such a complex portfolio across the world, one of the topics we're talking about in this MOOC is the difference between a brand positioning and a brand purpose. What's your view on that? Is there a difference, and if so, what is that difference? Well of course you have obviously different companies indeed, different schools will teach slighty different things in different words. So I tell you what our definition is and you see well that's helpful enough. But for me, the positioning is a much broader thing. And in our brand positionings, one of the things that we have within the positioning is what's the brand purpose? And the positioning for us would also define things like pricing and product. And I suppose more what we call the 6 Ps of marketing. I don't know how many Ps you teach, is it nine or four? Again, different people teach a different number of Ps. But it has the whole thing. Whereas the purpose to us is the core of the brand and what it actually stands for. >> And what would be an example of the purpose of one of your brands, maybe one that we'll talk about later on? >> I think Dove is a good example, it's a brand around the world so hopefully most of your students will have heard of it. A very successful brand, a growing brand, and what Dove has done is really tried to engage on this whole area of what they call real beauty. And the beauty industry has a certain point of view, and there are both positive but also negative consequences of that. And one of the negative consequences is about people's self-esteem. And Dove believes that beauty should be something of confidence rather than anxiety. And so this whole idea of building people's self esteem and celebrating real beauty while someone's version of beauty is what Dove's about. And so its purpose is very much around self esteem. And then it takes it through to what it does. So for instance, it had an ambition to teach 15 million young girls about body consciousness, and self esteem, and awareness. And it's now crossed that and so she's now setting a higher objective. So along with selling the products itself, it also walks and talks about its purpose. >> So part of your brand portfolio, maybe on the opposite spectrum almost, is the brand Axe or Lynx which trades under different names in different markets. What would be the purpose of that brand? And how does one manage such different brands under one umbrella? Does that make your life difficult or? >> Well we actually manage all our brands very much from the product brand perspective. So the Unilever brand. In fact probably many of your students wouldn't have even heard of Unilever. It's a brand that is behind the brands. And actually really only up until about ten years ago we were very silent about Unilever. We talk more about Unilever now really because of the Internet, and people can search and find out, what is the company behind the brands? And if there is going to be someone looking for the company behind the brands, then we better tell them what the company stands for. Otherwise, you wouldn't know. So we're increasingly starting to market the Unilever brand, but really more as sort of reassurance of what the company stands for. I'll come and talk about that a little bit later. So as far as our product brands are concerned, the Doves, the Walls, the Axes of this world, we very much lead with what they stand for. And Unilever's is quite quiet. I mean, there's a Unilever U on the back of a pack. In fact, it's the most used logo in the world. That little U appears on more bits of packaging that any other logo. And in leading with the brands then, it's very much about targeting a particular need or particular new state of mind. And finding the best way to engage people in that. And it's just good old segmentation. I mean if you take the example of a blunt, example of Dove versus Axe. One's for women, one's for men and that's basic segmentation. And of course the segmentation gets more sophisticated than that. So If you took Axe and looked at the whole deodorant market as a very big body spray business around the world. We're the number one deodorant company in the world and we sell Shore XO. That's again one brand with different names, different countries. And that's the leader around the world, but we also have Dove antiperspirant, we also have Vaseline, we have Axe, we have Impulse. And so we play our whole portfolio of bands, really targeting different things for different people. And the idea is to get the biggest share you can of the market without sitting too much on top of each other. Now there is some overlap of course, but we try and separate our brands. And that's the importance of things like purpose and positioning, to really pull the brands apart, to take the largest possible share of the market. With Axe versus Dove as you were saying. Very different brands, but funny if you peel it down a couple of layers. They're both talking about confidence in a different way. And what Axe is trying to do for adolescent young guys is just give them that little bit of confidence in the most frightening thing that any young man has to get into and that is the dating game. And I'm sure if you took yourself back a few years, it is really quite unnerving. And if you give guys a little bit more confidence that actually, if they smell a little bit better, they might not scare off too many women, that sort of tricept. And we do it of course in a tongue in cheek way. And the whole idea of Axe is to make people smile about it, well than get too concerned about it. And that's the way to engage in young men. So the different brands are trying to engage their target audiences in the best way possible to really obviously build a business. >> So you're targeting different segments with these different brands, but they're being managed internally by people. So you mentioned the four Ps, I say there's only four, and they're people, people, people, and people. And when you hire people, do you hire them into Unilever, maybe sometimes or into the brand specifically? Do you rotate people through brands? How do you manage these brands from a people standpoint? >> That's a very good question, I would say broadly we hire people to Unilever, and so we're focused on people's skills. Will that skill be marketing or sales or finance? Or even more fine tuned. Within marketing maybe you're looking for someone who's got some digital skills or whatever. So it's very much skill based. But then, when you are in the company, which brands and categories you work on can vary quite considerably. And surprise, surprise, the people who really have empathy with positioning do particularly well on that brand and hence they stay there for longer. So the SVP of Dove, Steve Miles, who has two young girls as daughters. But yeah, you wouldn't believe that something as sensitive as Dove is actually run by a guy. On the other side by the way, the creative, all through the 90s into the early 2000s, Axe was done by BBH and it was a lady is when it happened, Lizzy Yarnold. So you might not be what you might imagine. So it's more about people skills and their empathy towards the brand or what the brand stands for. I think you need to have integrity. And I think you can sort of tell whether the people behind a company or behind the brands really believe in what they are doing or not. And if they believe in what they're doing, I think it comes out in the brands. >> If we can stick with those two examples of Dove and Axe maybe, if I think about confidence in being a man or a woman, an adolescent man, it's so different around the world. At least on the surface. How does one adapt the positioning? I guess the purpose stays the same, but the expression of that purpose might differ, how do you adapt it, and how do you manage that adaptation across the world? >> Yes, I mean, this is obviously a big challenge. So one of the benefits of being a global company is being able to leverage your expertise, your resources across many countries. You're with the second largest advertiser in the world. And in doing that, of course then you would hope that we can buy advertising cheaper and that we can build our brands more effectively because we learn, we work with the best agencies, we learn how to build brands accordingly. But, against that absolutely, you're absolutely right, I mean there are huge differences around the world. But also there was some fantastic similarities. And if I took a young guy for example. There were more similarities between a young guy in Sao Paulo in Brazil, Mumbai in India, and Shanghai in China than him, his parents and his grandparents in Mumbai, for example. So what we do is we look for the themes that run across and find ways of this human truths that really resonate across different markets. Now of course, if you took an example of angst. Boys around the world are anxious about dating girls. And similarly, girls around the world, are concerned about beauty, and their own body self image, etc. But you have to find that executions which are appropriate for the different markets. And of course in some markets, a good example of some markets where you can't even show hair, and we're selling shampoo. I mean, that might sound like a difficult challenge, but you have to respect the sensitivities of the individual markets. And so yes you're right. Beauty in India is different from beauty in the USA and dating in China is different from dating in Brazil. But as long as you understand some of the codes and then you take the core human truth, you can make that work. >> And how does one gear up to manage that? How do you, if you think in terms of brand governance or even the structure, maybe some matrix structure. And what's your role as a global CMO versus the brand or the markets, leaders of the brand? >> So yes, that's a good question because again, different companies do it in different ways. But let me tell you how we do it as an example of how you could structure it. So we have a global marketing function which I had. But then we also have categories, which have what we call brand developers, I'll explain what they do. And then we have countries which have brand builders. So in reality, three different types of marketers, although I have the overview of how we do marketing in Unilever. Within the global marketing function, we have things where we believe specialists or we can leverage scale. So would that be things like media buying. It'd silly to buy media on a country by country basis. Google's a global company. Facebook's a global company. We should buy globally and leverage our scale as the second largest advertiser. So, I won that, and I won that around the world. Although, I had media people who were in Shanghai or Sao Paulo, I also have some global media people who manage partnerships etc. Another good example is the digital revolution that's going on right now. We want to have some experts around search or mobile etc. We wouldn't want to put those in each and every market. So again, centrally in the media function we have some specialist functions as well. Consumer market insight is one globally as well. So, of course, there will be market researchers doing consumer market insight who are in the categories and indeed in the countries. But they won't report up through to me, and why? I think that's now, I think accepted approach, it's just a little checks and balances. So many years ago when I was a marketing director, my market researcher reported to me as indeed my brand managers. And surprise, surprise if I got particularly passionate about something, the market researcher felt slightly influenced to say well that is a good idea or not, and what we want to try is to get independence, in judging mixes and ads and products, etc. So we want our market research separate from our marketers so they can remain independent. Artwork management, a global artwork systems. That's what. Then we go of course to category and brand of element. And in category and brand of element, they are running the positioning, the mixes, the advertising, the packaging, the innovation, the product. So really the things that really differentiate the brand across the world. And again, they will be sitting in one of our head offices in Singapore or London or in Rotterdam, for example, but then their teams will be spread around the world. So this isn't an Ivory Tower or some global marketers sort of dreaming up what's right for Mumbai. The person who's working on Dove or indeed on Axe in Mumbai, in branding, will be in India. And then we have the actual country marketers, what we call the brand builders. And they are really acting in real time of the moment developing the sort of ads I was saying on about Shore for example during a tube strike, the conversations. When you're having a conversation with a brand on Facebook, for instance, they will be replying and engaging with consumers. They will be doing sales promotions. They'll be engaging with our retail customers. They will be finding ways of really penetrating that local culture. And even, so hyper-localization, the difference between northern and southern India, you wouldn't get that feel. If you're trying to do something for a brand across the world. And in that way there's three different types of marketing putting together a cohesive approach, and that's why it's important to have standard approaches for brand positioning, of how we do advertising, etc. >> So remember where we'll end up with a question on Unilever. You said it's the most represented logo in the world on packaging. Some years ago it was getting more prominence and I think also meaning when you redesign the logo to, I believe it's vitality for life. To what degree is that expressed through the brands and are there some examples you could share with us? Yes so, I mean, Unilever actually has been a company with quite a history of purpose. I mean really, going back to Lord Leverhuman in the late 1800s. And he talked about, he wanted to make cleanliness common place. And this was before McKenzie and people like yourself talking about mission statements and things like that. He actually set out and he saw a very dirty England and Europe with the, you can imagine the slums of Victorian England. And he wanted to bring a very humble bar of soap to the world. To this day we're still the largest soap company in the world. And he starts of with actually one of the first brands. So up until that point. A lot of brands were named after the person who invented them, Hoover, or indeed Lipton tea was Sir Thomas Lipton. And Lord Liv Hume came up with sunlight as the brand name for his bath soap because he wanted to bring sunlight to everyone. Whether you are rich or poor, as such, and the cleanliness. And that sort of purpose has stayed with Unilever in many ways over the years. But it has got more pronounced more recently. And the thought of what we've been doing really, is trying to find a different way of doing business. We're genuinely trying to invent a different business model, that has sustainability at its core. Social and environmental sustainability. So quite a broad definition of what we mean by that. And in doing so, I mean I talked earlier, saying I'm the chief marketing officer of Unilever. But I also want sustainability as well. So environmental and social stability. Chief sustainability is of importance to me. And I also run communications, internal and external, corporate affairs, etc. And the thought really there is, and I'm seeing that a little bit more of the marketers [INAUDIBLE] running communications. Not so much sustainability. But the thought about running communications is in a joined up internet world. You can't really have a corporate communications development saying one thing and marketing department saying something else. I mean, it needs to be joined up because what you say to the city or even what you say in internal emails can now end up anywhere. >> So this really, I think, highlights very well the very simple models that I've talked about business, brand and behavior. And we saw in the business side, we've got the purpose that sits behind each brand, diversity of brands, portfolio of brands, and then these brands, of course, have certain behaviors across the world. It's a massive animal to juggle and to manage in a coherent way. Thank you for sharing your insights with us. [MUSIC]
