Unilever 2011 Annual Report Download - page 13

10
WINNING WITH
BRANDS AND INNOVATION
Unilever owns some of the world’s best known and best loved brands.
But ensuring they maintain their place in people’s lives requires
us to innovate, improve and expand our brands every day.
Superior products, design,
branding and marketing
At heart, our strategy with brands and
marketing is simple: discover what
consumers want and give it to them.
Butconsumer needs are complex,
and people are increasingly concerned
about sustainability as well as
functionality. The improvements we
make to our products and the
developments in our portfolio must
be led by these needs if we are to beat
our competitors at the point of sale.
For us, the product is the hero, and we
focus on what’s important: striving
towards sustainable products that
consumers prefer.
We operate a rigorous system of testing
our products against their main rivals
in every key market to ensure we deliver
the attributes that consumers want.
Whether it’s toothpaste in India, tea
bags in Russia, laundry liquids in Turkey
or bouillon in South Africa, we want to
find out what consumers desire from
our products, whether they prefer
them and why. Is it the taste, the
fragrance, the cleaning properties or
the packaging?
We conduct a careful analysis of what it
is about a product that consumers are
searching for.
Bigger, better, faster innovation
Science is one of the key drivers of
Unilever’s continuing success. We invest
in research and development (R&D)
to make sure we are first with the
innovations that will make our brands
bigger, better and more profitable.
Central to innovation is our Genesis
programme, an R&D process set up
in 2009 which fuels our longer-term
pipeline, applying breakthrough
technology across categories. The
programme is delivering results and
we are already seeing some of these
innovations in the market.
Forexample, we’ve discovered how to
extract and preserve the essence of
freshly picked tea leaves, a complicated
piece of science which is already being
used in our PG Tips and Lipton Yellow
Label ranges to give a unique fresh taste.
In PG Tips that innovation is coupled with
our unique pyramid-shaped bags to
make an even better cup of tea.
Another example is Rexona for Women
with Motionsense technology. Rexona
has long been one of the world’s biggest
deodorant brands. We know from our
consumer understanding that people
love its performance and, most
importantly, its fragrance.
However, as with all deodorants, the
fragrance slowly faded over the course
of the day. The conventional wisdom
was that there was nothing that could be
done about that, but we developed a new
technology to combat the problem. We
introduced Motionsense technology in
2011 with Rexona deodorant products. It’s
a new way of wrapping the fragrance up in
tiny bundles that open slowly throughout
the day when the body moves, releasing
it when it’s most needed. Subsequent
testing showed that this gives Rexona
a clear win over its key competitors.
No matter how confident we are that our
products deliver on what we claim, we
need to give consumers and regulators
strong proof to underscore this. This is
just as important when trying to get a
government to back a handwashing
programme as it is when advertising
a face cream. We have a clinicals
organisation in place with leading-edge
No1.
hair care supplier
in South Africa
Commitment to source
2
all ag
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materials
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sustainably by MAGNUM HEADS EAST AND WEST
Following its highly successful launch
in Indonesia in 2010, the Magnum ice
cream range was rolled out in North
America in 2011. Thanks to agreat
product along with extremely effective
advertising and marketing, Magnum
achieved early success in these two
highly competitive markets delivering
more than €80 million in turnover.
Its US advertisement was one of the
mostsuccessful in Unilever food history.
Unilever Annual Report and Accounts 2011
Report of the Directors About Unilever