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Vermeer BulletinLeading Global Brands

Unleashing OMO’s Global Marketing Potential

Executive Summary

Over the last 8 years, 200 global brands have participated in Vermeer’s Leading Global Brands™ Study. All participants share a desire to develop practical ideas and best practices for increasing global brand effectiveness. The Vermeer PulseCheck™ benchmark database now includes contributions by 20,000 global marketing colleagues, and serves as the cornerstone of Vermeer’s global marketing thought leadership.

Almost three years ago, the OMO Global Brand Team set off on a journey to accelerate the growth of Unilever’s biggest fabric-cleaning brand into a single consolidated global umbrella philosophy, Dirt is Good (DIG).

Known to consumers around the world as OMO, Persil, Skip, and ALA, Unilever’s laundry brand, with revenues well over $ 2 B, has evolved from a loose confederation of brands with over 25 wildly differing positions, names, and packaging designs, to a strong global brand under a single global umbrella: Dirt is Good (DIG). The consolidation under the DIG umbrella with a new winning brand development strategy and world-class marketing mix, has successfully challenged traditional market beliefs, and put competition on the defensive.

This Leading Global Brands™ Bulletin focuses on how the DIG Global Brand Team (GBT) overcame many of the challenges facing global marketers everywhere. By addressing each of the drivers of global brand effectiveness (see diagram below) the Global Brand Team led DIG to a more global positioning, and achieved elusive share

growth in one of the world’s most competitive categories.

Connect - By giving every brand stakeholder a voice through the PulseCheck™ and by demonstrating a more global and interdependent mindset, the DIG Global Brand Team emphasized the importance of connecting around an aligned strategy and focusing on similarities, not differences, across markets.

Inspire - The DIG team inspired not only consumers and customers, but also internal stakeholders around DIG’s purposeful positioning of unleashing human potential. The investment in dedicated events, resources, and engagement programs resulted in an increased sense of pride in the brand’s purpose and a stronger drive to deliver the strategy amongst DIG colleagues.

Focus -The Global Brand Team was courageous enough to address underlying differences, make clear choices, and drive alignment around a single universal truth. This allowed DIG to increase global leverage and efficiencies as well as local consumer relevance and effectiveness.

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Organize - Understanding that global success would require new ways of working, the DIG team challenged itself to demonstrate by example how to run DIG more globally. By agreeing to new roles and ways of working the Global Brand Team quickly changed the tone and productivity of DIG meetings, and inspired colleagues around the world to follow suit.

Build - The DIG Global Brand Team dramatically increased the quality of the brand’s marketing capability and programs with dedicated leadership and increased resources. DIG brand teams around the world now have access to tools and practical tips provided through the brand portal, regular brand bulletins, podcasts, and annual global brand stewardship meetings. DIG is now a best-in-class example within Unilever, and is enjoying the benefits of increased speed to market, higher quality marketing programs, and most importantly, profitable growth.

Who’s Who: Members of the DIG Global Brand Team

The Dirt is Good strategy development and implementation rollout was led by the DIG Global Brand Team (GBT). Led by Aline Santos, the GBT consists of the DIG Global Equity Director Karla Schlieper, the Regional Category Vice Presidents - Laundry, the functional representatives for Consumer Insights, Supply Chain, Finance, and R & D, and the agencies BBH and Lowe. The GBT conducts monthly telephone meetings, and meets face-to-face once a quarter to lead DIG’s brand development and guide implementation.

Focusing on a Single Universal Truth

Successful marketers focus ruthlessly to ensure that everyone working on the brand understands who their target consumer and customer is, and what needs the brand is addressing. The Leading Global Brands™ study finds that successful global brands are always built around a single universal consumer truth.

Initially, finding a universal truth to address posed a significant challenge to the DIG team given the huge differences across markets where the brand is sold.

Working with the category leaders responsible for the overall laundry portfolio strategy, the Global Brand Team locked down the “cornerstone” positioning that DIG should play in all markets. The decision was guided by market research firm TNS’s NeedScope™ study on consumer motivation. The results mapped Unilever and competitive brands against universal consumer needs and informed decisions on what needs each brand should address. The DIG team then identified key consumer insights to guide the development of marketing mix elements, from innovation to packaging.

Aline Santos - Global Brand Vice President and leader of the DIG Global Brand Team - is Brazilian and has over 20 years’ experience marketing Unilever brands in foods, household products and personal care. Aline’s successes include leading Sunsilk and the launch of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign in Latin America as well as the global Lux relaunch.

Rohit Jawa - Regional Category Vice President - Laundry, represents South Asia and Southeast Asia on the DIG Global Brand Team, and has been the driving force behind aligning the Dirt is Good brands across Asia. Based out of Singapore, Rohit is originally from India, and has held numerous marketing positions during his 20-year career with Unilever.

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Aline Santos: “When I became the GBT leader, the Dirt is Good umbrella had already been created. It was clearly very successful in some markets, but there was no global agreement on rollout. Once DIG’s cornerstone role was set, we quickly agreed that the ‘Dirt is Good’ brand proposition was what we needed to cut across all markets with relevance and resonance. Our job was to increase consistency and speed up the rollout.”

Inspiring with Purposeful Positioning

Winning global brands inspire their consumers and stakeholders with a vision that defines success in terms of both business and purpose.

The Leading Global Brands™ study finds that stakeholders inspired by a brand’s purposeful vision and positioning often surprise brand leaders with ideas and actions that go far beyond the call of duty. Aline Santos: “A brand with a social mission is always more appealing to consumers as well as to the organization.”

The fabric-cleaning category had touted technical brand attributes in ad pitches for years. Over time, these campaigns lost their power to inspire consumers and internal stakeholders. For DIG, whose technical claims were relatively inconsistent across geographies, it also served to amplify the brand differences across the world.

Traditionally, DIG’s position, brand names, and packaging varied immensely around the world, resulting in difficult global brand strategy discussions. The new Global Brand Team broke the deadlock by looking forward. Aline Santos: “When you have so many differences across all aspects of the brand, the best wayto resolve this is to focus on the future. Then everything is possible, and everyone has the opportunity and time to align.”

The DIG Global Brand Team worked with the single, inspirational and purposeful positioning: Unleashing Human Potential. Rohit Jawa: “The brand idea is based on the belief that when kids are developing and learning they will sometimes get dirty, and some parents worry about this. DIG can free mothers from the worry by taking care of the dirt. In other words; the dirt goes, but the learning stays.”

The DIG team then collaborated with strategic agency partner BBH to tighten the DIG positioning around a very specific form of Human Potential: Child Development.

The resulting creative framework was called “Every Child has the Right to be a Child.” Alongside a communication campaign, partner Edelman/Strategy One put together a whitepaper on Child Development with the endorsement of world-renowned Yale Child Development experts Singer and Singer.

“...Once DIG’s cornerstone role was set, we quickly agreed that the ‘Dirt is Good’ brand

proposition was what we needed to cut across all markets.”

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Aline Santos: “DIG is committed to encouraging parents to leave their children free to get dirty. Children Development is the ultimate benefit we want to offer as a brand.” The brand addresses this universal consumer need, a need that is intrinsically connected to the brand itself. The brand also offers a solution to this need by raising awareness, promoting outside play, and naturally, by taking care of stains.

To ensure broad understanding and complete company alignment around the global positioning for DIG, Vermeer helped the Global Brand Team stage the brand’s first-ever global stewardship event in South Africa, a significant DIG market. At the event in early 2007, everyone from the Unilever Chairman down voiced enthusiasm for the brand vision and confirmed the importance of running DIG as one global brand. To bring alive the power of the new positioning, the event featured an afternoon of restoring an outdoor sports facility for a suburban Cape Town school. This built tremendous inspiration for the brand vision, and the teamwork ignited urgency around the need for a much closer global collaboration.

The organizing and leadership of the stewardship event in South Africa also served to inspire the DIG Global Brand Team itself. After reviewing the very positive feedback forms, the team agreed to step up the level of global collaboration. The spirit was one of “If we can do this so well, we can do anything ...”

Since DIG’s first stewardship event, “Every Child Has The Right” has been rolled out globally and has received much recognition for raising public awareness around the topic of child development and the importance of outside play. The brand has received awards for projects in many countries, including the building of more than 50 new public playgrounds across overcrowded Asian cities. Rohit Jawa: “We have even influenced the academic curriculum in Vietnam so that kids now have the right to recess and play.”

Connecting Around an Aligned Strategy

Successful global brand leaders ensure that the brand’s vision and strategy fully recognize the realities as perceived by key brand stakeholders around the world, and that the brand strategy and the overall business strategy fullyalign. Connecting is about building an interdependent global mindset among all brand stakeholders and building a culture of “looking for similarities” across the brand community. Only then solutions can be leveraged across geographies, and speed and cost efficiencies are achieved.

DIG’s significant global differences meant there was a great need to connect across the brand community. Vermeer’s `global marketing PulseCheck™ was used to reach out

to all brand stakeholders and identify key areas of opportunity for growth, as well as benchmark DIG’s brand effectiveness against other world-class global brands.

With the global brand “destination” agreed, and key opportunities and challenges prioritized, Vermeer supported the Global Brand Team as they defined the brand’s new 3-year global strategy. The agreement on the first fully aligned DIG global brand strategy was made possible by the recognition of the varying development stages of the brand across markets. Discussions were focused on the differing roadmaps required to get to the agreed destination. Rohit Jawa: “Once we had the destination agreed, I think we did a pretty good job of translating the vision quickly to regionally relevant strategies.”

“...DIG is committed to encouraging parents to leave

their children free to get dirty. “

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The resulting Dirt is Good strategy document went on to guide DIG’s priorities across all key marketing mix elements at local, regional, and global levels.

With the new DIG strategy agreed upon, the team worked with Vermeer to develop and implement a comprehensive internal engagement plan. The goal was to ensure that all key brand stakeholders quickly felt informed and connected to the brand, the plan, and perhaps most importantly, understood what was expected of them.

The engagement strategy included hosting a second global brand stewardship event a year later, this time hosted in Turkey, another key DIG market. The second stewardship event was used to explain the strategy, force discussions

on tactical implications at all levels, and to celebrate the Turkish DIG team’s successful implementation of the new DIG strategy.

Aline Santos: “The gathering of hundreds of DIG people from all the corners of the world in Turkey was critical to forging the key brand strategies, share new learning, and more importantly connecting to celebrate our success.”

Organizing for Big Ideas

Brands are finding it harder to cut through the clutter, and in today’s “Flat World,” one company’s new brand initiatives often reappear shortly thereafter amongst competing companies. Most leading global brands are organizing themselves globally to increase their focus on fewer, but bigger innovations and communication initiatives. The Leading Global Brands™ study resultsindicate that only the global brands that actively organize to focus and promote thinking “bigger” ultimately win.

The DIG Global Brand Team quickly realized that their familiar region-centric ways of developing brand communication and innovation were no longer tenable. Costs per project outweighed results. A review of planned innovation and communication projects at a meeting in Paris in mid-2007 served to start a new global way of working and cut the project roster by nearly half. Although many projects were cut, several bigger cross-regional or global projects were actually added, but now with priority resources. Further consistency in packaging, design, and product formulation were also agreed and implemented.

The DIG Global Brand Team worked hard with strategic agency partner BBH to develop a global campaign to bring alive the new “Every Child Has The Right” communication framework. The resulting ROBOBOY work has now been rolled out to 20 markets and achieved significant results.

Meanwhile, the brand’s supply chain and R&D representatives identified significant cost-saving measures by consolidating ingredient mixes and fragrance purchasing. At the same time DIG’s R&D team, supported by Vermeer, used the global brand vision to identify new big ideas for stronger and more consistent product claims around the world. In a series of global workshops, consumer-insight-driven product claims platforms were developed to drive growth, offering winning claims without increasing complexity.

“Once we had the destination agreed, I think we did a pretty

good job of translating the vision quickly to regionally

relevant strategies.”

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Building Capability for Superior Delivery

To increase a global brand’s speed to market and prevent the costs of reinventing the wheel, successful global brand leaders make it a priority to build global marketing capability and leverage across geographies. By offering strategic guidance and tools and support systems, global brand teams can better equip all brand stakeholders around the world for success.

The success of DIG’s first brand stewardship workshop in South Africa helped the DIG Global Brand Team recognize the internal thirst for strategic brand direction and for tools that could help translate the global brand vision into concrete local marketing activities.

Central to building DIG’s global marketing capability was the creation of the Dirty Club, DIG’s new global community to support brand stakeholders across the world.

Since its launch in 2007 the Dirty Club has employed podcasts, videos, and email bulletins to communicate strategy and demonstrate its implementation. The brand’s intranet site served as a one-stop online resource for all brand vision and strategy

documents, links to all advertising, and many examples of winning activation programs from around the world.

The intranet site included a downloadable PDF of the hardcover Brand Book that was given to everyone in the DIG community to explain the DIG vision and create a common language among team members. The portal also offered tools and templates for brand planning and market implementation, as well as a DIG phone and email directory to promote global interaction and collaboration.

With dedicated resources in the global team and significant support from Unilever’s Marketing Knowledge Management group, DIG grew in less than a year from virtually no global interaction to becoming exemplary for building global marketing capability.

Results Exceed Expectations

In 2007, former Unilever Chairman Patrick Cescau challenged the DIG team to promote a more global mindset, change behavior, and increase the speed to market of global initiatives. Less than two years later the DIG brand has dramatically improved global alignment and ways of working, and results have exceeded expectations.

By the end of 2008, DIG’s double-digit growth and market share gains in key markets had contributed positively to Unilever’s overall performance and made DIG one of Unilever’s largest global brands. Motivation to work on the brand is now markedly higher; the evaluation of the second global stewardship event in Turkey showed significant increases among internal stakeholders, concerning both the “importance of DIG becoming a stronger global brand” as well as this common sentiment: “proud to be a part of the DIG global brand community.”

“By accelerating the global rollout and driving for

consistency, we can now truly benefit from our global

scale...”

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DIG’s more effective marketing activities have led to recognition and results around the world. BBH’s ROBOBOY, a made-for-TV film, won Bronze at the Cannes Lions Awards, and Lowe’s work for DIG has also been awarded several awards. Perhaps more importantly, DIG’s “Every Child Has The Right” activation programs have generated a huge amount of positive brand publicity, media coverage, and consumer response in many countries.

The more global focus and ways of working of the DIG Global brand leaders have led to faster rollout for global programs, and the DIG brand has never been marketed more consistently or efficiently around the world. Today, DIG communication may still differ from market to market, but if this is the case, it is a conscious choice made to reflect differences in market, category, or brand development stages, and not just because someone somewhere decided to reinvent the wheel. Aline Santos: “Our job as the Global Brand Team has been to take a brilliant positioning, give it focus, and make it ‘real’ in all elements of the mix. By accelerating the global roll-out and driving for consistency, we can now truly benefit from our global scale. It’s been a tough, but very rewarding journey. Throughout the process Vermeer challenged us as a Global Brand Team to step back and align around a shared vision and they provided coaching, expertise, and frameworks for us to work with. I believe Vermeer significantly contributed to DIG’s progress to become a more effective global brand.”

About Vermeer

Vermeer is the only global marketing consultancy focused on unleashing purpose-led growth through the development and embedding of consumer insight-led marketing strategy, structure and capability.

They provide solutions to strategic marketing challenges, rooting their approach in consumer research, stakeholder understanding and financial analysis. Vermeer’s whole-brain thinking brings an intrinsically multi-lens and practical approach to their work.

Beyond their cutting-edge client work, they deliver thought leadership to change the conversation in business: Their Marketing2020 study is the most global and comprehensive CMO research program in the market and was featured as the cover story of Harvard Business Review’s 2014 summer issue.