What is the point of mayonnaise? At one of the world’s largest consumer-products companies, it’s no longer just about sandwiches and potato salad.
Ads for Hellmann’s once focused on taste, spreadability and ingredients. Now the brand is on a mission to curb food waste—part of Unilever PLC’s push to give each of its 400 brands a social or environmental purpose. A Hellmann’s Super Bowl spot this year showed former New England Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo tackling people on the verge of throwing out food.
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What is the point of mayonnaise? At one of the world’s largest consumer-products companies, it’s no longer just about sandwiches and potato salad.
Ads for Hellmann’s once focused on taste, spreadability and ingredients. Now the brand is on a mission to curb food waste—part of Unilever PLC’s push to give each of its 400 brands a social or environmental purpose. A Hellmann’s Super Bowl spot this year showed former New England Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo tackling people on the verge of throwing out food.
The brands-with-purpose strategy has become a centerpiece for Unilever since Alan Jope took over as chief executive in 2019. The Scottish marketeer defines purpose as having a point of view on issues important to the planet or society. He has said the U.K.-based company could sell brands for which it can’t identify a mission.
And so Knorr, a 150-year-old brand best known for its bouillon cubes, now wants people to diversify their diets with more plant-based foods, such as white icicle radish and an Ethiopian grain called teff, for better nutrition and less environmental impact.
Ice cream brand Wall’s, originally from England, says it is committed to raising national happiness levels. “Nobody can be grumpy while eating an ice cream,” its website notes.
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Vaseline petroleum jelly is helping refugees suffering from skin problems. Dove has successfully helped push for laws to prohibit discrimination against people based on their hair texture or style.
“We’ve organized all of our priorities in the company around three very deeply held beliefs: that brands with purpose grow, that companies with purpose last, and that people with purpose thrive,” Mr. Jope told investors shortly after becoming CEO. He has said that brands with purpose increase sales twice as fast as those without.
How’s it going so far? Unilever’s share price and sales growth have lagged behind those of rivals Nestle SA, L’Oréal SA and Procter & Gamble Co. in recent years.
Some analysts, investors and former executives say that rather than talking about purpose, Unilever should put greater emphasis on shifting its portfolio toward faster-growing categories and on developing new products. Scrutiny has grown since Unilever walked away from its rebuffed $68 billion bid for GlaxoSmithKline
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PLC’s consumer-healthcare business earlier this year, after investors and analysts questioned the price and strategic fit.
“A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot,” Terry Smith, chief executive of Fundsmith, one of Unilever’s largest shareholders, wrote in his annual letter to investors in January. Unilever, he added, “is obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.”
With mounting investor criticism, Mr. Jope has toned down his rhetoric on purpose lately. A person familiar with the CEO’s thinking said that Mr. Jope sees his early rhapsodizing about purpose, without expressly linking the financial benefits, as a mistake.
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“It is the icing on the cake. It is not the cake,” Mr. Jope said on a February call with reporters. “We also want to be absolutely clear that purpose isn’t a substitute for having fantastic quality, innovation, advertising and distribution.”
Although Unilever is unusual in applying the purpose strategy across its global portfolio of food, home and personal-care products, many big multinationals are now positioning their brands behind social and environmental issues, hitting on themes such as Black Lives Matter, refugee rights, gender equality, LGBTQ rights and climate change in their ads.
Companies say taking a stance helps them attract top talent. Workers, especially young ones, increasingly expect their employers to reflect their own values. Consumers can respond, too. Surveys have found that people are increasingly willing to use or drop brands based on a company’s response to calls for racial justice.
There can be risks, as Walt Disney Co. found after taking a stand against Florida’s recently passed Parental Rights in Education bill, which critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In response, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that would terminate the company’s special tax district. The bill reflects a growing critique from some conservatives who say that companies are promoting liberal social values, which demands a response.
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Unilever has long prided itself on social responsibility. During its early days as a soap maker in the late 19th century, founder William Lever built a village for his workers in northwest England, with houses, welfare programs, a hospital and schools. In modern times, the company has been a vocal advocate for issues such as cutting carbon emissions, not testing on animals and reducing plastic waste.
Mr. Jope, who started at Unilever as a marketing trainee in 1985 and rose to head its personal-care business, took the initiative further when he became CEO in 2019. “We’re going to put purpose end-to-end throughout our organization. It is the fuse for our brands, it is the inspiration for our people,” he said at his first investor seminar after taking the helm.
In prepared remarks alone, the word “purpose” was mentioned 87 times at the seminar. Some analysts wanted to hear more about growth drivers and cost savings.
Mr. Jope capped his first year as CEO with a profit warning that wiped more than $6 billion off Unilever’s market capitalization in a single day. He remained undeterred and said his purpose strategy would keep brands relevant, attract talent and drive sales.
He regularly holds up Dove as an example. In 2004, Dove began running ads for a skin-firming cream that showed everyday women in their underwear. The subsequent “real beauty” campaign depicting women of different sizes, ages and races in a category whose ads are dominated by images of models helped Dove become one of Unilever’s most profitable and recognized brands.
“Dove was just a cleansing bar. It didn’t have any divine right to be special,” said Peter Dart, who led advertising giant WPP PLC’s work for Unilever for nearly two decades, until 2019. “It organically and smartly developed a purpose.”
More recently, Dove has helped promote the Crown Act, which would ban discrimination against people, including at work or school, based on their hairstyle or texture. The act was passed by the House of Representatives in March, and similar legislation has passed in a string of states.
Dove’s sales rose 8% in 2021, its fastest growth in eight years, which Unilever credited partly to its purpose marketing. The companywide growth rate was 4.5%.
Purpose hasn’t come as easily to ice cream brand Magnum. U.S. employees spent hours brainstorming with outside marketing firms seeking a purpose for the product last year, according to a person who worked on the effort. Executives explored ideas including unapologetic indulgence and self expression, but struggled to link them to an obvious social mission, the person said.
In Europe, Magnum rolled out a “true to pleasure” campaign and ran into trouble after an ad compared the guilty pleasure of eating an ice cream to a gay relationship in countries where it is illegal.
The U.S. team balked at using the tagline because Magnum is also the name of a condom brand.
Breyers ice cream similarly is still looking for its purpose after months of toying with ideas such as supporting American dairy farmers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Klondike has considered the idea that everyone needs a break.
Deodorant brand Axe once relied on sexually charged ads featuring women wowed by the “Axe effect.” It ditched the spots in 2016 when Mr. Jope was Unilever’s personal-care head and switched to ads urging consumers to shed traditional notions of masculinity.
One early ad showed men asking if it was OK to be skinny, depressed, scared or a virgin. Euromonitor data shows that Axe’s U.S. market share declined between 2018 and 2020 from 8.9% to 7.8%.
Unilever executives say the brand lost fun and got too heavy. Mr. Jope has defended Axe, saying new campaigns need years of consistency to sink in with consumers. Last year, Unilever brought back the “Axe effect” tagline.
In India, Unilever’s second-largest market behind the U.S., Cornetto ice cream spent years making ads about young romance. Then local executives were told the brand’s new global purpose was encouraging happiness. “We pushed back, saying we can’t move from romance to happiness just so we can align purposes globally,” said Himanshu Kanwar, Unilever’s general manager for ice cream in India until last year. The company allowed the local team to decide when to implement the global purpose, Mr. Kanwar said.
To determine whether a brand has a purpose, the company polls consumers on whether they think it is benefiting society or the planet. Whether that lifts sales is an open question.
“Purpose is a very abstract concept,” says Rahul Shah, who until last year ran Unilever’s ice cream home-delivery business and now works for a startup in Austin, Texas. “It’s very difficult to simply attribute sales growth to just general advertising, let alone purpose-led marketing,” he said.
Stan Sthanunathan, who last year retired as head of Unilever’s consumer insights team, said the company’s talk about purpose belies how much its brands spend on advertising more straightforward product benefits. Even Dove advertises more about soft skin than it talks about purpose, he said. Brands with a purpose that resonates with consumers stand out from rivals, command a price premium and help rally employees, he said.
Whether purpose drives sales is “a million-dollar question,” he said. “This isn’t a 100% foolproof methodology or anything.”
Unilever attributes Hellmann’s recent sales growth to the brand’s food-waste campaign, but the company has also invested in a vegan option and in new flavors it says have done well. Euromonitor data shows its global market share dropped to 17.5% in 2021 from 19.9% five years earlier.
Mr. Jope has listed examples of purposeful brands—such as sprays being used to clean mosques in Indonesia during Ramadan—that some marketers have said sound like standard business these days. Others, such as Popsicle’s campaign to encourage play, are just “a standard emotional marketing strategy,” according to Peter Field, a London-based marketing consultant.
Sean Gogarty, a former Unilever marketing executive who now consults for the company, said many brands don’t robustly test whether their adopted purpose will translate into stronger consumer engagement, and fail to differentiate their brands.
Unilever’s Sunsilk shampoo wants to “inspire girls to dream of a future full of possibility.” Clinic Plus shampoo wants mothers to encourage their daughters to be strong. Lux soap wants women to “express their beauty and femininity unapologetically.”
Mr. Jope has hailed Ben & Jerry’s, which supports causes including climate justice and refugee rights, as one of the best examples of a purposeful brand.
But Unilever’s hold over Ben & Jerry’s decisions is minimal because a 2000 acquisition agreement allows the brand to retain decision-making about its social mission. Lately, Mr. Jope has publicly disapproved of some of its pronouncements.
Those include a 2018 anti-Trump campaign featuring a flavor called Pecan Resist, a tweet saying President Biden was fanning the flames of war by sending troops to Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a decision last year to stop selling in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The latter triggered several pension funds to sell shares in Unilever.
The brand’s sales grew 9% last year. When asked on a February call with reporters whether Ben & Jerry’s recent political stances helped, Mr. Jope attributed the gains to innovation instead.
Write to Saabira Chaudhuri at saabira.chaudhuri@wsj.com