Case Study: A Vision for Unilever
In 2009, the multinational company Unilever adopted a new strategic vision that integrated societal and environmental responsibilities. The company's Sustainable Living Plan was the center of this strategy. This plan aims to help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing, decouple Unilever's growth from its environmental impact, increase its social impact, and enhance the livelihoods of all those involved in its supply chain. Read this chapter to discover how Unilever merged sustainability with profitable growth.
What steps did Unilever take to re-engineer the company and implement the Sustainable Living Plan successfully? How did sustainable innovation play a role in helping Unilever achieve its goals? What were the results?
Strategy
"We form a vision about the future. We look at trends. Planetary boundaries might be a trend. Urbanization might be a trend. Single households might be a trend. It's crucial to know where this world is going. That includes the geopolitical environment, the rise of technology, e-commerce, and so on. We form a picture of the future as it might be five or ten years on.
"We have defined the categories that we operate in: Food & Refreshments, Home Care, and Beauty & Personal Care. These categories define their strategies: where do they want to play, what do they want to be in? They look globally, they look at consumer trends. Based on these findings we have discussions with each of the categories, internalize that, the categories define their strategies, and then we deliver it.
"We have divided our global business into eight clusters. Within them we have what we call country category business teams (CCBTs). For example, they might be Personal Care in France, or Home Care in the United States. These units are fully responsible for making these innovations come alive in the regions that they are responsible for. We see the input from the categories as a starting point, and they test and implement them. This is important to strike the right balance between global efficiency and local development".
How can Unilever develop local innovations into products that will sell on a global scale?
"Most of the innovations that take place are usually invented close to the market through trial and error. In the UK we recently launched Persil Powergems, a significant innovation. Powergems are a completely new laundry format that use 100 percent active ingredients and are twice as concentrated as powder. The packaging is up to 30 percent lighter and allows us to get 40 percent more product on a pallet, which means we could reduce the number of trucks on the road by 800 per year, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 75 tonnes plus a million miles less traveled.
"The formulation is also an industry first, in that it removes the requirement for mined materials, therefore reducing non-renewable ingredients. That is typically an innovation that has come from a technology breakthrough which we developed centrally and will scale up as much as we can. However, most of our innovations are developed in the market. In India, for example, 63 million people lack access to clean drinking water, so we invented a water purification brand called Pureit, now with about 100 million customers.
"We also bought an air purification company called Blueair, founded by Bengt Rittri 20 years ago to start a clean air revolution by bringing people the world's best air purifiers. Bengt spent 10 or 15 years refining the model. We were fortunate enough to associate ourselves with that company. The brand is now going into more than 60 countries. Many innovations start in a local market and then move outwards.