It is fair to say Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez raised some eyebrows earlier this year when he announced the FMCG giant was to increase its spending on content creators to engage a “suspicious” consumer becoming more immune to traditional marketing techniques.
Regardless of where you stand on the topic, Unilever’s top marketer Esi Eggleston Bracey has quickly got to work embedding the strategy. Speaking at Variety’s Cannes showcase in partnership with Canva yesterday (17 June), Bracey told the audience there has been a “fundamental” change in the way marketers approach their work to win over “sceptical” consumers.
“It is using creators’ voices to express the brand. It’s not a one off piece of creative any longer. At Unilever, I talk about we’re moving from that old model of a one-off broadcast to getting many people to communicate with many other people on your behalf. It’s the only way,” she said.
It is fair to say Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez raised some eyebrows earlier this year when he announced the FMCG giant was to increase its spending on content creators to engage a “suspicious” consumer becoming more immune to traditional marketing techniques.
Regardless of where you stand on the topic, Unilever’s top marketer Esi Eggleston Bracey has quickly got to work embedding the strategy. Speaking at Variety’s Cannes showcase in partnership with Canva yesterday (17 June), Bracey told the audience there has been a “fundamental” change in the way marketers approach their work to win over “sceptical” consumers.
“It is using creators’ voices to express the brand. It’s not a one off piece of creative any longer. At Unilever, I talk about we’re moving from that old model of a one-off broadcast to getting many people to communicate with many other people on your behalf. It’s the only way,” she said.
Bracey explained businesses need to partner with those creators whose voice matches the brand’s voice and then “trust” them to speak on your behalf. Anything less would not come off as “inauthentic” and would be dismissed.
When we thought about marketing in the past it was about capturing hearts and minds. The next challenge is how you capture hearts and machines.
Esi Eggleston Bracey, Unilever
Not that Unilever is abandoning traditional marketing principles entirely. When it comes to building trust with the consumer, Bracey explained the most important thing to be is “consistent” and true to the brand.
“But, in this world, consistency doesn’t mean dull. It’s translating that consistency, that essence that matters into relevancy, today,” she added.
The chief growth and marketing officer pointed to a campaign Unilever ran around its Vaseline brand, which is over 155 years old. The campaign “leaned in” on consistency, but it was executed in a more modern way. Unilever invited people to share their ‘Vaseline hacks’ – from taking a plaster off safely to keeping fragrance on – and then “approved” the ones that actually work.
“Creators went wild,” she said. “We reached 63 million people through social interactions and our business grew 43%. Consistency, then, is creatively translating that to real human needs and leaning into what matters to people.”
The Unilever CMO also spoke to the challenges facing the market industry tomorrow, mainly those coming from generative AI. Unilever has been experimenting with AI to solve the “toughest problems” the business faces.
Unilever must learn you can’t outsource trust to influencers
She gave the example of the tension between global and local branding, noting that the business has over 400 brands and 190 markets to service. This is a task that would normally have been carried out by local marketing teams to ensure consistency and a local flavour was correctly applied.
However, now Unilever has delegated that work to an AI tool trained on its brand assets, freeing up the local teams to do more strategic work.
Despite the efficiencies that have come from embracing AI within the marketing function, Bracey is well aware of the challenges facing the industry as agentic AI (which has the capacity to operate autonomously) grows in popularity among consumers.
“When we thought about marketing in the past it was about capturing hearts and minds. The next challenge is how you capture hearts and machines,” she said.
“It’s how you elevate your brand to be chosen without consciousness. That will ultimately feed the machine, because they will see what we want and we need to optimise for both.”
Influencer influence rising
Sharing the stage with Bracey was Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, CMO of US delivery service DoorDash, which recently agreed to purchase Deliveroo.
He shared his own experience of working with influencers to grow the business, arguing it’s important to utilise as many creators as possible, of varying sizes of influence, to win both nationally and locally.
“We have lots of big deals across the platforms, but also we have hundreds of local nano influencers that are talking just about a particular deal in their hometown to their audience,” he said. “We go all the way from Hollywood celebrities to someone who has 1,000 followers, but is super influential in a very small town in Kentucky.”
Creators have been a welcome boon for Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder, with the software business taking advantage of the growing impact of influencer communications in B2B marketing.
She pointed to a relationship the firm has with French judoka Shirine Boukli, who is also an engineer by trade. The people coming to see her content are being introduced to Autodesk in an unexpected way, which in turn has increased consideration for the brand.
“It’s about finding those authentic connections and really empowering them to be in the driver’s seat,” Treseder said. “Where brands get it wrong is when you try to be prescriptive, because then it’s gone from content creation to advertising and it doesn’t work as well.”
