Bringing the World's Best Products to Underserved Communities

Since 2012, Unilever International (UI) has been serving millions of underserved consumers from remote markets and diaspora who crave the brands they miss from home. We speak with Aseem Puri, CEO of Unilever International, to find out what it takes to serve the underserved in 200 markets across the globe.

By Dominic Gabriel-Dean

Q:How does Unilever International define underserved markets? How have these markets changed since 2012?

Aseem: Unilever International was set up more than 10 years ago as a specialist organisation to serve the needs of underserved markets, consumers and channels. These underserved markets refer to over a billion people who live in West, East and Central Africa and over 100 million consumers who live on the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean and hard-to-reach markets like Mongolia. We also serve markets such as Afghanistan, Yemen which are conflictridden and pose logistics challenges.

The company started by bringing Unilever’s most popular brands to these underserved consumers, such as our personal care brand Dove, our nutrition brand Hellmann, and our home care brand Omo. Over the last 10 years, Unilever has held a strong position and market share. Today, we serve over a billion consumers in these markets.

In the past decade, consumers in underserved markets have evolved. They now have access to technology and the Internet. They travel and seek the best brands around the world. Unilever International’s focus is to bring the best products, the best nutrition, and the best innovation to every single consumer, no matter where they are located. No one in the world should be deprived of our best brands and products. We have constantly been evolving our portfolio of products to keep up with our consumers’ changing needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of our key moments in serving consumers in underserved markets. These markets urgently needed sanitizers, masks and various other hygiene products to manage the pandemic.

The team at Unilever International supported these underserved communities by bringing these products under our hygiene portfolio to them.

Today, we are present in most underserved markets with Unilever’s portfolio and brands. We pride ourselves in catering to all income groups and categories of consumers, by bringing them a wide assortment of cleaning, hygiene, nutrition, personal care and beauty products.

Q: How does Unilever International and Unilever then work together in practice? How do you complement each other’s operations?

Aseem: Unilever International is an integral part of the wider Unilever organisation. We work very collaboratively with all of Unilever’s brand teams, category teams and market teams.

For any given product, there are two types of markets. The first is underserved small markets typically in the Pacific, Mongolia or Maldives. Unilever International manages these markets fully and brings all our different brands to these consumers.

The second is larger markets like India, Thailand or Vietnam. Unilever International works to complement the local business there by bringing in our premium portfolios. For example, there is now a big Korean beauty craze worldwide. We bring brands like AHC, our leading Korean skincare brand into Southeast Asia. Brands like St Ives and Dove are also brought from the U.S. into the rest of the world by Unilever International. We are now looking into bringing premium European food brand such as Hellmann to consumers around the globe.

In short, Unilever International plays a complementary role to Unilever. We supplement and support the local business to serve the needs of underserved consumers and manage premium portfolios and premium channels such as e-commerce.

Q: Unilever International has international launches once a week and serves about 200 markets. How do you and your team manage all these different product and market portfolios at such a large scale?

Aseem: We have teams that look out for each category of Unilever which are divided into five business groups: Beauty and Wellbeing, Personal Care, Home Care, Nutrition, and Ice Cream. There is somebody responsible for each of these business groups in Unilever International. Their job is to identify the best portfolio for each business group.

Unilever International aims to bring the best products to our markets. Therefore, we source efficiently from the best locations, and then bring that portfolio to different markets around the world. When we see products performing well in one market, we have the agility to bring these products to other markets in a short time.

There is very little difference today between consumers in, for example, New Caledonia which is the middle of the Pacific, and consumers in France. When we see a portfolio performing well in France, we offer it to consumers in New Caledonia. Similarly, the U.S. and the Philippines are closely connected. Therefore, if a brand is doing well in the U.S., we quickly bring it into the Philippines. We curate our portfolio by identifying the most successful and loved products through e-commerce reviews, consumer testing and sales data. That being said, we have a common portfolio for many markets. This minimises the complexity of managing different portfolios across many countries.

Q: How do you differentiate your marketing across different regions?

Aseem: To put it simply, there are three parts to this. First, we look at the brand communication and advertising. Although we must balance the look and feel of the advertising across regions, the key messages remain consistent. For example, Hellmann, one of our fastest-growing brands, is the world’s number one mayonnaise brand—and that messaging rings true everywhere. Rexona is all about keeping you fresh as you move and giving you protection from sweat and odour, that key message in its advertising remains the same no matter where you are.

Second, we differentiate our outreach by using local influencers, and that will obviously vary by country, language, and culture.

Third, we have our in-store execution, which is very similar across markets. For example, our best activation for our largest detergent brand OMO gives consumers a chance to win a free washing machine. Some common tactics, such as offering a free bucket with a hand wash product, are consistently successful in every part of the world.

Q: Can you describe your process of working with influencers?

Aseem: We look at the influencer’s philosophy, their point of view, and see if they have a similar area of interest with the brand. These tells us whether they match well with our brand. After which, we collaborate with them to create content around activations or even innovate on products with them. We believe in cultivating long-term partnerships with our influencers.

Q: Unilever International describes its culture as entrepreneurial. What does that look like in practice? Can you share some examples?

Aseem: Unilever International prides ourselves in being agile in decision-making, rolling out products and seizing an opportunity when we see one. For example, a few years ago we identified lip care as a growing space even though it was a small business for us then. We managed to roll out our lip care products to 50 countries very quickly to seize the opportunity.

We have a small team that is always connected to each other, and we openly share our ideas and success stories over WhatsApp and Email. This allows team members to collaborate quickly to bring the best portfolio and information from one country to the other.

Like I mentioned earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic created a big demand for our hygiene portfolio. Our teams worked around the clock to supply hundreds of millions of sanitisers around the world with great agility. Typically, what takes other companies months and years, we accomplish in days and weeks because everyone is connected here. We believe in taking calculated risks and empowering our teams to make calls for the business, thereby enabling our people to make quick decisions.

Q: In an earlier interview, you mentioned your aim of turning Unilever International into a leading-edge digital first organisation. Can you share what such an organisation would look like?

Aseem: We have transformed our distributor operations and ordering process from offline to a digital process on our own platform. More than a thousand customers can place orders, browse our portfolio, track the progress of their shipment, check their shipment documentation, carry out

and measure payments. This digital platform is part of our work to digitise our future demand forecasting.

Our next goal is to digitise our marketing and content creation. We are also looking to enable our work with AI to increase our productivity and efficiency.

Q: You were Unilever International’s CMO before you became its CEO. How does your marketing experience enable you in your job as CEO?

Aseem: It always helps to understand marketing because you are keenly aware that everything revolves around the consumer and their needs. Before I make a decision, I ask myself: “Is this really going to benefit the consumer? Is this going to improve their lives and solve their problems?” Having been in marketing first means I have the advantage of understanding our consumers intimately and deeply.

Marketing in practice is very external-oriented and focused on talking to consumers and customers outside of the office. I’m a creative person, I like to innovate and create new projects—all of which are qualities that were honed by marketing. External orientation, innovation and consumer focus are three things that marketing taught me that still enable me today as CEO.

Q: What are some major opportunities for Unilever International in the next few years?

Aseem: I think the biggest opportunity for us is underserved consumers who are diaspora seeking the same brands from their homes. For example, these could be the Indian diaspora in the U.S. who are looking for our coffee brand Bru. Many Filipinos, Vietnamese and Thai employees working outside their countries in developed markets want products from home with which they are already familiar.

Serving this segment is a profitable and fastgrowing business for us. But we believe that we are currently just scratching the beginning. We have a long way to go, and a lot more portfolios we can bring to the diaspora. This business may grow two to four times its current size and become one of our largest verticals.

Another area that we just scratched the surface on are corporate partnerships with leading hotels such as IHG and Mariott and airlines like Singapore Airlines and Delta. This is potentially a huge area of growth.

E-commerce B2C still remains a small business for us, and we have a young team looking after this segment. Unilever International just started its e-commerce journey and we believe there is immense potential in this area.

Q: Do you think the shift to e-commerce by FMCG goods will pick up pace over the next few years?

Aseem: There are several markets where e-commerce makes up 15 to 20 per cent of the market. In markets like South Korea and China, the numbers are even higher than that. Expanding e-commerce in emerging Europe and North America is currently a strong challenge.

However, we believe that e-commerce will continue to grow and perform. If we bring the right portfolio to the right markets, have a strong understanding of the dynamics of a premium portfolio, hone our expertise in performance marketing, and have a good e-commerce enabler and fulfilment centre in place, our e-commerce will continue to grow. Our offline stores will continue to have high importance and relevance everywhere. We will always operate as a hybrid model, both our online and offline modalities are important to us.

Unilever International (UI) is the white space partner for Unilever across many countries across the globe. In 2012, Unilever International (UI) was set up to serve emerging – and fast-growing – geographies, consumers, customers, and channels worldwide that were created by trends like globalisation, migration, travel and digital commerce. Unilever International’s purpose is ‘to serve the underserved’, and is at the heart of our core strategy

Visit https://careers.unilever.com/unilever-international for more information.