Brand and content: How Unilever keeps its focus on the consumer

Unilever’s global e-commerce director of health and wellbeing Anusha Babbar shares how the consumer goods giant approaches brand equity, meaningful content, customer experience and ecommerce issues.

Key insights

• For consumers to say something good about the brand, make the entire product experience seamless, then find ways to engage and excite them.
• Technology has made it easier to understand shopper sentiment and Unilever leverages this via social listening and reviews assessment.
• The explosive growth of e-commerce has stressed capacity in logistics networks, which remains an evolving challenge and opportunity. 

In your experience, how critical is brand equity within digital commerce environments? Given how crowded the online marketplace can be, how important is the role of the brand in securing consumer attention, trust and purchase?

Indeed, online marketplaces are getting increasingly crowded and, more than ever, it’s important for brands to drive disruption and clearly differentiate themselves on e-commerce platforms. Not only that, we also need to ensure that we establish brand credibility to drive consumer trust, particularly for categories with high consumer involvement like the vitamins, minerals and supplements (VMS) category.

For instance, the OLLY brand design – from its packaging to digital assets and product pages – ladders up to its purpose of making health delightfully easy and intuitively communicates a wellness lifestyle message with a clear brand promise. Leveraging its strong design and brand identity, brand purpose and personality, OLLY comes to life online through various touchpoints, helping to establish credibility within the category and stand out versus competitors in the digital space.

How can you improve your word-of-mouth marketing to create passionate brand evangelists?

Give multiple reasons to talk about your brand! First, the entire product experience, including the service, should be made as seamless and amazing as possible for consumers to have something good to say about the brand. Then find other ways to engage and excite them.

For example, what are they talking about? What do they care about? How can we help them and be part of the conversation in an authentic manner? And finally, encourage consumers to share their thoughts, whether its via reviews, Instagram engagements etc.

For instance, during the pandemic, we realised that topics around self-care became higher on the priority list for our consumers. Knowing that, we planned our content to ensure they would be relevant and helpful to consumers, such as centring our livestream content on “SELF CARE 101: How to #KeepCalmStayHealthy with OLLY”, and co-creating social content with our key opinion leaders (KOLs) that focused on stay-home wellness activities.

How does Unilever ensure that the content produced is “fit for purpose” and has “meaning” for the consumer? What are some successful campaigns launched recently where consumers get to experience the brand?

To create content that is fit for purpose and has meaning for the consumer, brands really have to know their consumers – who are they, what are they searching for, usage occasions etc.

A strong understanding of the consumer journey is also essential in completing the picture. Technology has made it much easier to understand shopper sentiment and we leverage this via Unilever’s capabilities in social listening and reviews assessment to understand more deeply what our shoppers are thinking about. As much as possible, data should be at the heart of your marketing strategy and content should be designed and optimised based on what we understand about the consumer.

We know from consumer insights that consumers in Singapore are looking for solutions to get good, restful sleep and launched OLLY Sleep in Singapore at the beginning of 2020. To date, OLLY Sleep is one of our most successful launches and is well-loved by consumers. Understanding that consumers were also interested in finding out more about this topic, the team worked on creating bite-sized sleep tips and published them on the OLLY Singapore website to help them navigate their health needs.

To read the full interview, visit WARC's website.