[ The Best of '08 Marketers: Unilever Canada ]
November 24, 2008 | By Kristin Laird
Unilever Canada demonstrated once again in 2008 that beauty is more than skin deep and that marketing can contribute to more than the bottom line.
The “Campaign for Real Beauty” has been a catalyst for expanding the definition and discussion of “beauty” since it first launched in 2004. While Geoff Craig, Unilever’s vice-president and general manager, brand building, jokes there isn’t anyone in the marketing community that “wants to hear more about Dove,” it’s a story that remains worth telling.
Unilever is riding on the wings of Dove’s 2007 success, extending the campaign on multiple fronts this year including the “Sleepover for Self-Esteem” parties where girls 8-14 tuned into C
Most recently, Dove launched WakingUpHannah.ca, an interactive romantic comedy that follows the life of a 20-something woman trying to discover herself. The site enables visitors to pick which Dove “Go Fresh” product Hannah will use, click on her cellphone to view text messages and pictures, and more.
“It’s just another example of Unilever’s gutsy approach,” says Nancy Vonk, co-creative director at Ogilvy & Mather Toronto, the agency behind the effort.
Unilever was also behind Body and Soul—a play based on letters written to their bodies by women 45 and older. That was followed by the Finding Body and Soul documentary, which aired on CBC and took viewers on a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the play.
Dove was mentioned only twice during the hour-long show, making it more credible with consumers, according to marketing manager Alison Leung.
The brand follows this philosophy across several executions, sometimes sacrificing sales for sincerity, adds Tony Chapman, CEO of Capital C, the agency that manages Dove’s promotional advertising in Canada.
“Dove invests in mother-daughter seminars that have no payback, but a mother will walk out with her daughter and go, ‘I can now talk about beauty and the fact that she looks beautiful in freckles’...and Dove was a facilitator of that,” he says.
In other “do good” acts, Unilever’s margarine brand Becel was the primary corporate sponsor of “The Heart Truth” campaign, a multimedia effort aimed at educating women about heart disease. At the time of the launch, only 13% of Canadian women knew heart disease was the number one health concern for women. That number had risen to 24% by the end of the campaign, says Craig.
“What we were trying to do was create a movement around heart health in Canada,” he says. “When you have that many women more actively thinking about heart disease, that has to be a good thing.”
Becel also experienced 7% growth in the margarine category, the highest increase in three years, says Craig.
And Hellmann’s mayonnaise helped Canadians incorporate wholesome food into their diets through the “Real Food Movement,” setting up 100 community vegetable plots in urban areas across the country and encouraging Canadians to plant gardens in their backyards and window boxes.
It’s the company’s eye for thoughtful campaigns that evoke consumer response which makes it a stand-out marketer. “Unilever understands meaningful, and what is meaningful to the consumer, and making their brands authentic in that space,” says Chapman.
