Global marketing as a system Lessons from the Unilever + Percolate partnership

Introduction to Percolate

Founded in 2011

Introduction to Percolate

200+ employees worldwide

Introduction to Percolate

One of the fastest growing software companies

#6 Fast Company

Most innovative companies in marketing and advertising

The System of Record for Marketing

Manage all your marketing in one place

Values

Elements

Elements

Consistency

Reach

Trust

Brand

Percolate connects global brand themes with local results

Unilever

Local Markets

USA Canada UK

Percolate makes global brands strongerGlobal to Local markets

Unilever at a glance

Unilever is the world’s 2nd largest advertiser. How do you create a system that makes its marketing more efficient, consistent and effective?

— Unilever’s challenges

— Creating a global marketing system at Unilever

— Results and lessons

Today’s presentation

Unilever’s challenges

— Lack of clear, consistent global brand identities

— Inconsistent understanding of social media and digital marketing best practices across regions

— Multiple agencies in every market and across different brands developing content and managing communities

Unilever’s key marketing challenges

— Off-brand content, inconsistent messages and damaged equity

— Regular violations of “rules” in social media posts

— Costly effort duplication and operational inefficiency

This caused:

“One of the things we needed to do was bring together all of the communications, breaking down silos within the company. Breaking those silos internally was the biggest challenge. We needed to bring everything together and make it a part of the overall marketing strategy.”

— Luis Di Como, SVP of Global Media at Unilever

Creating a global marketing system at

Unilever

We began in 2013 with 3 brands in 15 markets

SURF(detergent)

KNORR(stock cubes)

HELLMANN’S(mayonnaise)

Argentina

UK

USA

Germany

South Africa

Indonesia

Brazil

UK

Global

Turkey

Philippines

Brazil

Canada

USA

Centralized all files

One global set of brand guidelines

Standardized content creation and approval process

— Training. “Brand calibration” sessions organized for each market to ensure content teams are producing is locally relevant, on-brand, and in line with global quality standards

— Standardize technology and process. All teams in the same software using the same process (182 hrs of onboarding)

— Continuous assessment. Used quarterly program reviews, employee surveys and feedback system to keep improving.

Improvement principles

Results and lessons

BEFORE AFTER

BEFORE AFTER

$10M+ Decreasing Unilever’s cost of content saves more than ten million dollars annually on marketing production across the company.

Internal estimate of annual global cost savings

Global efficiency & savings

Foundation has to come first

IMPROVE

STREAMLINE

ANALYZE

GOVERN

CENTRALIZE

Learn more

percolate.com/clients

Thank you.