Unilever: “Marketing needs to be noble again”
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Unilever wants to make marketing a “noble” profession again by driving social progress as well as business growth after decades of “selling for selling’s sake”.
Persil’s Dirt is Good campaign is a frontrunner of ‘crafting brands for life’
Marc Mathieu, senior vice-president of marketing at Unilever and the architect of its recently introduced “crafting brands for life” marketing strategy, believes that marketers should get back to the origins of the discipline as a way to drive social progress as well as sales.
He says: “We want to make people believe that marketing is a wonderful profession again and make it noble as a way of serving the progress of people’s lives in a good way. In the last few decades of the 20th century marketing has become selling for the sake of selling, but at its inception, marketing was inspired by the Henry Fords, the William Levers of the world - people with a vision to bring products to people that could create progress and improve lives.”
Unilever has set out its “crafting brands for life” strategy as the marketing equivalent of Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s sustainable business strategy to double the size of the business without increasing its environmental footprint, and hopes that it can help “reinvent” the way businesses approach marketing.
It is based on the idea that marketing should balance “logic and magic” and become less about the process of marketing and more about creating a brand strategy that puts real people’s lives at the centre of everything, rather than consumers.
Mathieu adds: “I really believe that marketing is a wonderful profession and necessary tool of the way the world needs to work in the future. If we really believe that corporations have a key role to play in driving social economic and environmental progress, marketing has a big role to play.”
I believe that marketing done well is an amazing profession. some people do it more as a job, and some people do it more as a craft. Marketing can be seen as a process but brands are the reason we do it, what people buy and buy into - that’s where thinking about marketing brings us on the path of the process, but when you think about brands you elevate the vision of marketing to a higher level.”
“It’s not just a process or succession of steps … marketing is at its best and much more interesting when you are thinking about real people you can improve the lives of.”
Readers' comments (4)
Dan Langford | Tue, 7 Feb 2012 4:13 pm
Absolutely - marketing is simply about stimulating and distributing value - for all.
That's pretty noble, surely.
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Keith Trivitt | Thu, 9 Feb 2012 1:39 pm
It’s not so much that marketing needs to be noble but that marketers should perform their work in an ethical and responsible manner that keeps their clients’ and the public’s best interests in mind. Marc Mathieu of Unilever is spot on, however, when he asserts that marketing needs to get away from “selling for the sake of selling” and to refocus its efforts on “bring[ing] products to people that could create progress and improve lives.”
At a time of disastrously low trust in business around the world, it behooves companies to refocus their marketing efforts on the value they provide to society rather than what society can give back to them in sales and profits.
At the core of our work must be a focus on how our products and services, or that of our clients, improve people’s lives. If we can communicate that to the public and our customers in a transparent and honest manner that doesn’t try to pull the wool over their eyes, but rather, engages them in a way that provides benefit to both the customer and the business, then marketing will, indeed, become more noble.
But we musn’t focus solely on being noble in and of itself. Rather, we should aim to inform the public and aid in society’s decision making and progress. Doing so serves the public good, improves people’s lives and also improves business. That is the type of 21st-century focus marketers should have.
Keith Trivitt
Associate Director
Public Relations Society of America
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AJ Perisho | Tue, 21 Feb 2012 4:11 pm
Great post!
It's my belief that marketing is a noble profession....when done correctly.
This means that as marketers, we help the business achieve one the first goals of the business, to grow.
By achieving consistent growth, the business is achieving it's mission of delivering a specific solution to it's clients.
There is obviously more to say, but this is not the place to write another article :-)
Thanks for sharing!
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Anonymous | Tue, 13 Mar 2012 3:04 pm
Consumers ARE real people.....and surely building connections with those people has always been the point? Equally, let's not delude ourselves with the grandiosity entrenched in the snake oil sales category in the first place. At the end of the day, our main objective will always be to facilitate the sale of . more widgets to more people: we're not saving lives or feeding the hungry (unless there's a sound commercial rationale for doing so). Not noble, but ethical and responsible, if we do it right.
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