Different channels reach different people at different times in different mental states. As Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have spent decades demonstrating, brand growth comes primarily from reaching buyers who don’t currently buy you—the light and nonbuyers—not from deepening engagement with fans who already love you. Creators are brilliant at the latter. They are considerably less good at the former. Growth demands mass reach. Mass reach requires mass media. It’s an inconvenient but unavoidable marketing reality.
And one that Unilever’s CMO Barreto totally accepts. He is a fan of Ehrenberg-Bass. He attends its seminars, understands the power of penetration, and the need for big brand, mass communication to deliver it. Presumably, he is also scratching his head and working out what to say to his boss, his global team of marketers, and the agencies that work for them.
There is also a one-size-fits-all problem inherent in Fernandez’s statement. Sure, Vaseline had a remarkable run on social media. Twelve percent volume growth over two years is genuinely impressive for such a big heritage brand. The general case for creator-led content in skincare, where demonstration and peer testimony matter enormously, is generally proven.
But Unilever runs four hundred brands. Vaseline is not Hellmann’s. It is not Marmite. Good luck driving sales of Domestos using toilet influencers sharing various flushing videos across TikTok.
Unilever has been here before. Under previous leadership, it decided every single brand needed social purpose. Not just the brands where purpose was authentic and commercially coherent—Dove, Lifebuoy, Ben & Jerry’s—but every brand in the portfolio. I once spoke to the poor soul tasked with finding the brand purpose of Pot Noodle, a brand whose entire proposition is wanton, purposeless junk.
The purpose mandate became as uncomfortable as it was naive, and Unilever eventually reversed course.
The lesson should have been indelible: what works brilliantly for one brand does not work for all.
Prescribing a single strategic doctrine across 400 brands serving different consumer needs is mistaken marketing dogma. Fernandez has not learned the lesson. He has simply found a new doctrine—social-first, creator-led comms—and is now applying it with the same portfolio-wide, broad-brush vehemence that produced the purpose debacle.
Different dogma. Same failure in basic brand management.
If you are a brand manager at Unilever right now, sitting on a brand that needs mass reach to grow while watching your CEO declare mass advertising dead, you are entitled to feel mightily confused and not just a little bit perturbed.
