Creativity bridges performance-brand gap, ensuring brand differentiation: Unilever's Conny Braams

Highlighting the power of creativity, Conny Braams, Chief Digital and Commercial Officer, Unilever, said that by embracing a creative commerce revolution and applying innovative strategies throughout the consumer journey, brands can effectively bridge the divide between performance and brand, ultimately ensuring brand differentiation and creating unmissable experiences.

During a session named ‘The Real Beauty of Long-Lasting Brands’ at Cannes Lions 2023, Braams and Alessandro Manfredi, Chief Marketing Officer, Dove, Unilever, shared Unilever’s approach to building brands that last. They also spoke about how brands grow in ever-changing societies and more complex marketing landscapes where culture, community and commerce converge.

Braams said that the focus should not be solely on investing in performance marketing at the expense of long-term brand building. Instead, there is an opportunity to simultaneously build brands and ensure sales at the same time. Bridging the gap between brands and performance requires creativity, Braams said. 

“Who said that performance marketing can only be short-term focused? At Unilever, we have brought marketing and sales closer together because we want to stay ahead of the convergence that is happening. The biggest opportunity in the fast-moving consumer goods industry is what we call the creative commerce revolution. If we apply creativity throughout the end-to-end consumer journey, we know we can bridge the gap between performance and brand,” Braams stated.

“The biggest challenge of this decade is the erosion of brand differentiation. In an era of change, we need to have a compass and build emotional connections and stand out in culture. With that, you become unmissable,” she added. 

Braams stated that today customers are changing, the way they shop is changing, technology is changing, businesses are changing and actually marketing is changing faster. 

“We were blessed with a couple of decades of relatively stable global systems and we are now moving to a world where turbulence is likely to be the norm for the next couple of years," she said.

“As marketers, what do we do in this era of change where everything seems to be changing and where there is so much turbulence? We zoom in on what is really critical for consumers. There are three critical things which are changing, how consumers live, how they shop and how they play. Firstly, people are rewriting traditional life blueprints and markers of success. So, we see single households on the rise and less people having children. There are 36 countries already in the world where the population is currently declining. On top of that average ages are rising and we are seeing a huge increase in the percentage of the population above 60. It will soon be over 20% of the population. However, we don't see this reflected in ads. Only 6% of global ads feature characters over the age of 65,” she added. 

Furthermore, she stated that the second thing is shopping differently. The global second-hand market for clothing is expected to become a $350 billion business and that is massive. As many as 42% of Gen Z have a preference to buy pre-loved goods. So, the focus is on thrift economy, refilling and reusing.  Thirdly, entertainment is changing. The gaming industry is now bigger than the movie and the music industry combined. The younger generation is not just using gaming for playing and entertainment, but they are socialising and forming communities over there.

“The average age of a gamer is 35 so it is concerning the mass population. It isn't just about gaming but now entertainment is becoming a medium of shopping. So, services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are becoming media channels and they will soon become commerce channels where people can probably shop what they watch. Basically, these three things are now also disrupted by generative AI,” Braams said.

“In this era of change, how do you now build connections with people who are changing so much and build brands for the long-term? At Unilever, we do that with our approach by getting on the frontline. It is based on three principles of getting real, doing good and being unmissable. Dove, a €5 billion brand at Unilever, has really found what their purpose or their compass is in navigating all this change,” she added. 

Manfredi said that emotional connection really matters and it is at the heart of what makes brands last long. 

“As per a study from Kantar, in the last 10 years, the differentiation of brands across the industry has gone down the drain and now that, in my view, is the biggest challenge for marketers in this decade. It is not AI, it is not a metaverse, it is not the latest cultural trend but it is the steady decrease of differentiation of our brands. We need to learn to make our brands unmissable and make them stand out. But with so much change, new channels, new trends and big changes in consumers it is very easy to lose the plot. So, in order to make brands stand out consistently all the time, we need a compass to navigate change,” Manfredi said. 

“That's why I believe that the brands that are best fed to thrive in the long term are the brands that have three elements. First is ruthless clarity about what a brand stands for. The best brands can be expressed in a centre of gravity that is in a couple of words. For Dove it's about real beauty. For Magnum it's about pleasure and ice cream. Brands also need to go beyond their functional benefit and their emotional benefit, to build a belief system and a value system. That's what I define as the compass to navigate change,” he added. 

Furthermore, he said that the second element is putting the purpose at the heart of your business model which becomes your compass. The third factor which is usually underrated in the marketing discipline is consistency. In order to be consistent, one needs to learn what their boundaries are. These three factors are the ones that help brands in being unmissable but doing it consistently despite the changes. 

“Dove is a brand that is rooted in real beauty as a centre of gravity around which we built our belief system which is to change beauty from a source of anxiety to a source of happiness and everything we do comes from that. So, 19 years ago, when we discovered that only 2% of women feel comfortable to define themselves as beautiful, we decided to change our campaigns and created the campaign for beauty to widen the definition of beauty with our casting and message,” Manfredi said. 

“As we did the campaign for beauty, we realised that we needed to change our boundaries and some of the rules we figured out came from 19 years ago. For example, never to leverage celebrities or models for our advertising to sell our products but only real women. As we were digging more into the issue of body confidence, we learned that there is a cohort of women that pays the biggest price to low body confidence, which is young girls,” he added. 

Manfredi said that six out of ten young girls around the world don't feel confident to raise their hand in class, express an opinion, go to the doctor, join a club or do sports. For this, Dove came up with the DAF Self-Esteem Program which is a series of initiatives, activities, educational tools, workshops, developed with academics, all clinically tested, to have a significant impact on the resilience of young girls when it comes to body confidence. 

“So far, we have educated 95 million girls and we have been declared the number one provider of body confidence,” he added.  

Manfredi also recalled Dove’s campaign that promoted avatars that look like real women in gaming. 

“A couple of years ago, the metaverse became the talk of the town. So, we asked ourselves how can we leverage the metaverse to make a big difference to body confidence for young girls? The answer was quite simple, which was about gaming because 1.3 billion women (across the world), including girls, are playing games and they make up for 50% of the population of gamers and 60% of them have started playing before 10. The sheer majority of these women and girls don't feel represented by the standards of beauty that you see in the gaming world. That's why I decided to take action on this,” he added. 

Braams said that at Unilever the majority of the growth is coming from long-lasting effects of brand building. It builds base sales and it builds resilience.

"Now, we know that we live in a world where there are many new opportunities coming up that are instantly more measurable. That creates for human nature an inclination to be wanting to invest in the short term but as lines between commerce, media and entertainment are blurring, we feel this is the moment to stop the divide between short and long term and really say how do we make sure that we build brands and convert to sales at the same time," she added. 

“As an industry we have started to invest in three things including retail media, ad supported streaming and influencer or creator marketing,” Braams said. 

“Influencers and creators have become an important part of our marketing mix and they not only convert to sales but they make sure that our brands are part of culture, that they are effortless to buy and also that they transmit trust. In an era where trust is becoming scarce, where people are not trusting media, brands, business, governments, NGOs or politicians anymore, trust is really critical. We know that 61% of consumers trust influencer or creator recommendations,” she added.

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