Humanising marketing and creating digital super brands: the view from Unilever

Lena Roland

This event report looks at how Unilever, the FMCG business, is adapting its marketing approach to put greater emphasis on "people", rather than "consumers", or worse, "targets".

Humanising marketing and creating digital super brands: the view from Unilever

Lena RolandWarc

"The species lacking most in (the) marketing community" is humans, observed Marc Mathieu, svp/ global marketing at FMCG giant Unilever. Speaking at Marketing Week Live, an event held in London in April 2015, Mathieu appeared to be on a mission to humanise marketing. And changing industry parlance is a good starting point: he does not call consumers targets. "It reminds me of the military, (as though) we want to shoot them, and we don't."

Unilever makes and sells more than 400 brands worldwide and consumers...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

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