Case Study: Defining Brand Purpose with Unilever
For each of the Unilever brands to successfully create tangible change, they needed to move beyond traditional brand purpose — that focuses solely on why the brand exists — to a social purpose.
Breaking down the challenge…
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Consumers are increasingly looking for brands to take a stand on the environmental and social issues impacting our world. In light of this cultural shift, Unilever charged all of their brands to define their social impact-based brand purpose.
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Eight brands were selected to lead this effort. While they were all at different stages of developing their purpose, collectively they faced a similar challenge: determining how a consumer brand can talk about and take action on social issues in a way that is authentic to their brand, meaningful to consumers, and impactful to society.
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Purpose facilitated a New Power Accelerator program to equip Unilever brands with the tools to develop their stance on important social issues, define brand actions, and develop participatory activations to engage consumers in creating change.
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I led the brand purpose strategy for two Unilever brands - TreSemmé and Knorr. Through our work together, both brands defined:
Real Purpose: Identified an issue space they could tackle and why they had credibility to engage on the issue.
Real Impact: Gained a new understanding of the type of change they can create and the role their brand can play to create change on their social issue.
Real Participation: Learned how to build a network of partners and develop brand activations that invite consumers to take action and scale the brand’s impact.
