🤝 What Unilever’s New CEO Is REALLY Saying About Influencers

Fernando Fernandez has barely settled into his new role as CEO of Unilever, and he’s already making it clear where he sees the future of the company’s marketing strategy:

-That people are intrinsically “suspicious” of messages coming from brands and corporations.
-That Unilever’s social media spend is jumping from 30% to 50% of its total marketing budget.
-That the company is going to 20x the number of influencers it works with.
-That he wants a specific influencer for every single one of India’s 19,000 zip codes and Brazil’s 5,764 municipalities.
-That Unilever needs to a “machine of content creation.”

Unilever is coming at this from a position of weakness and existential urgency.

Their last CEO was in the job for only 18 months. They’ve had massive layoffs and a historically painful restructuring. And activist investors are adding even more pressure to the company’s financial situation.

So Unilever’s CEO can’t just pretend that they can do business as usual. They need dramatic change and transformation. And he’s identified influencers as a key part of this.

Most brands are sleepwalking their way through a half-hearted “influencer strategy.” They tick the box by saying “hey look we’ve paid this cute little influencer to do an Instagram post for us.” But they’re missing the point.

They miss the true strategic value of partnering with influencers and content creators who can build their credibility, reach, and conversion within key target audiences in culture.

This goes deeper than just paying someone to do a post as the scraps of your media plan. Influencers aren’t just human billboards.

Influencers can provide cultural insights for both your marketing and product development. Influencers can fuel your biggest creative concepts that link to your company’s broader strategic business goals. Influencers can be media brands, ambassadors, strategic creative partners, and more.

And if you don’t treat them well, they might just end up creating their own brand to compete with you.

This is the foundation of what we do at PWR House, building an influencer-first approach to how brands drive results in today’s world:

1. Brands should be strategic about the cultural areas they want to play in.
2. Brands should be thoughtful about who exactly they want to work with.
3. Brands should look at influencers as long-term partners and activate this through a global creative strategy.

If you are the CMO of a brand, you should be asking yourself how you’re going to take your company on the journey of being influencer-first.

Because now that Fernando Fernandez has dropped the mic on the modern marketing zeitgeist, you should be scrambling to make sure your board, shareholders, and customers think that you are actually doing a good job.