Why Unilever believes “consumers are dead”

This event report discusses why Unilever, the FMCG giant, believes the idea of the "consumer" is flawed.

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...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands