Why Unilever believes "consumers are dead"
Andrea Sophocleous
"Consumers were a bad idea to start with. Consumers are dead," Marc Mathieu, Unilever's worldwide senior vice president/marketing, told delegates at the World Federation of Advertisers' (WFA) Global Marketer Conference, held in Sydney in March 2014.
"You are not consumers. You are people. You are only consumers [for] a very short fraction of your day, and you don't want to be considered – or to be labelled – as a consumer."
Such a shift in emphasis by the FMCG giant reflects a profound failure of the vocabulary – and resultant practice...