If marketing for the past century was all about selling, today it’s about finding a purpose first to earn the right to sell. Unilever’s Los Angeles-based worldwide senior vice president for marketing, Marc Mathieu, is a “brand purpose” evangelist, arguing that before media channels and messaging is even dreamt up, brands must find a reason to be.
It’s part of Mathieu’s involvement in a global project with the World Federation of Advertisers called ‘Reconnect’ and the subject of his address next March as a high-profile keynote speaker at the Global Marketer Conference, being staged by the AANA in Sydney.
“It requires very different marketing and advertising and therefore it is a journey of transformation,” Mathieu told AdNews.
“By the way, people today prefer if you are honest and transparent and don’t have it all figured out and you don’t always get it right. The world is creating a lot of transparency. People want to be able to trust not just as a brand what you do but also what you believe in. We need to evolve. We need to continue at moments in time to be very, very sharp. Marketing is a beautiful profession especially if it is powered by social cause or social purpose.”
It’s certainly part of the brave move Unilever made in 2010 to embrace environmental sustainability as a core pillar of the group’s business globally – in the face of fierce corporate and government debate about whether human activity is causing climate change. Equal to its sustainability mission, Unilever has embraced social purpose as a central tenet.
Mathieu tips his hat to Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ initiative – which became the third most-shared online video of all time – as a case in point around Unilever’s ‘Brands for Life’ global mission.
“If you try as we did in the past to get a great piece of content and you put it out and then you buy lots of media and think your job is done, now your job is not done,” Mathieu said. “Your job is a never-ending story of transparency and trust with people. People today prefer if you are honest and transparent and don’t have it all figured out and you don’t always get it right.”
This article first appeared in the 15 November 2013 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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