I missed most of yesterday’s presentation from Simon Clift, global CMO of Unilever Personal Care, but was fortunate enough to steal a few minutes of his time earlier this morning to find out about the radical changes in brand management at the world’s second largest advertiser.

Unilever: has the tanker turned around?

“As a company”, he says, “we’ve changed more in the past three years than in the last 20.”

Gone are the multi-headed, decentralised brands that not long ago had an individual identity in almost every national market. They’ve been replaced by central specialists running brands at a global level, supported by operations-led teams on the ground to implement