‘Desire at Scale’ with Unilever’s CMO Leandro Barreto

0:00Do you think a AI could have ever uncovered that insight? Or does it take a human level of ingenuity and creativity to see that insight and connection?

0:10Leandro Barreto:The insight could not have been done by an AI. The observation, yes. Technology can help us a lot to gather the observations. But I think that last mile, the mile of really translating this into emotion, that I don't think it can be captured that easily.

0:34Quick audit of your day. Did you use Dove in the shower? Did you spread some Hellman's on a sandwich? Use Vaseline? Are you wearing deodorant? If so, you've been interacting with one of the brands managed by today's guests, Leandro Barreto, the recently appointed Global Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever. He's steering the nearly 100-year-old company with over 400 brands and a marketing budget in the billions. He's been in the company 23 years. He's worked all over the world, from his early days in Brazil to now headquartered in London. He's uniquely positioned to answer the ultimate question facing our industry.

1:08In this AI-powered moment, what is left for human marketers? His answer will surprise you. So, we're hearing how thousands of creators are using Vaseline in fun and unexpected ways. Leandro is a masterclass in frontier marketing. Let's find out how he does it.

1:29I'm incredibly excited today to speak to Leandro. He is the newly appointed global CMO of Unilever. That's managing over 400 brands, a budget in the B for billions, and trying to create relevance and culture at scale, all in this AI-powered moment. Leandro, welcome to the pod. Hello. You've been at Unilever 23 years. You're now the global CMO. That loyalty to one company is super impressive. I mean, I've been in Google 15 years now, so I'm sort of, I'm getting there. Okay, what is the secret sauce inside of Unilever? Because you could go to other companies and you've chosen to stay at this company for 23 years.

2:07So what is the thing that has kept you at this company? What is the thing that I don't know about that is inside of Unilever and is magical?

2:15Leandro Barreto:I think it's this obsession we have in serving people inside and outside. We can call this consumer love. We can call this consumer intimacy. But at our best, I think the work here is really about understanding what people want. In my career, many times I was like, am I a marketer? Am I a psychologist? Because ultimately, I'm trying to get into what matters to people. And we really value that. We remain true to this idea that what we do needs to have a meaning. And I think this is really important. And this gives energy. I never felt I needed to find energy anywhere else. Can you give me an example of where you found meaning in a brand?

3:03There's 399 other brands in your portfolio that you sort of focus on. Just help us understand finding that meaning for consumers and how that translates into a marketing strategy.

3:14Leandro Barreto:I can give you many examples. One of my favorite is Dirt is Good. Dirt is Good is our laundry brand. It's called different names in different countries like Persio, Omo, Surf. But essentially, it's a brand that was built through this idea that when you get dirty, this means you are growing, you are developing, you are enjoying life. So the meaning of this brand is, of course, offering products that help you to remove stains and getting clothes that are clean and fresh. But it is ultimately about allowing people to get dirty without the guilty. And I think this is fantastic. So, for example, more recently, we are working with the Arsenal team in the UK.

3:55Leandro Barreto:And it's fantastic to see that the closer we get to the community, the more the meaning of the brand makes sense. Because we could be talking about the obvious stuff like removing stains, many brands activating sport. But because we understand the role this brand has, when we talk to women in Arsenal, we're talking about stains that are not the stains normally people talk about. stains in their underwears and blood and the things that are very intimate and many brands would shy away from. But we can do because we understand what the brand means to these communities, right? So I think Dirt is Good is a great example and what I'm super proud of.

4:36I remember that campaign. It won all the awards. So congratulations. Also, for everyone listening, I've already recorded an interview with Juliet Slott, who is the chief commercial officer of Arsenal Football Club, Soccer Club. It was a really interesting episode where she talked about the brand partnership she has with companies like yourselves. Just on that, that is good. Do you think a AI could have ever uncovered that insight? Or does it take a human level of ingenuity and creativity to see that insight and connection?

5:05Leandro Barreto:I think that the insight could not have been done by an AI. The observation, yes. Technology can help us a lot to gather the observations about how clothes matter to people. We could probably have got very close to the understanding the occasions in which people get dirty and their clothes get dirty are occasions where they are playing and developing. But I think that last mile, the mile of really translating this into emotion or really having that feeling that only people who actually have kids, for example, and know how much they playing outside, it starts outside, all their development, that I don't think it can be captured that easily.

5:50Leandro Barreto:I still believe that there's poetry there, that it's essentially human. I agree with you. it's really interesting seeing how AI is developing. And it's all happening so fast, who knows? But we, inside of Google Marketing, found we had a database of 3 million verbatims, 3 million comments that people had given us about our hardware business. And we weren't looking at it. It's impossible to read 3 million comments, right? But we actually put AI on it. And that AI was able to organize it, structure, help us look at it. But it still took a human to ask the questions of AI. Because when we asked, what do you see here?

6:27It didn't give us anything particularly insightful. But when we actually said, explain this, explain that, we are able to find some really interesting insights. And so I think the notion of AI helping us uncover things at scale is really, really important. But that sparkle genius, the insight, I just don't see AI yet getting there. Maybe it will, but not for a while.

6:47Leandro Barreto:Absolutely, Josh. I'm with you. And I was thinking a lot about that recently in a different example. Vaseline in South Africa is a beloved product. And we always, we know that. We know people use Vaseline in many occasions, and especially parents, they use to put Vaseline in the kids' faces before they go to school. It's a ritual, right? Anyone who has grown up in South Africa, they know that Vaseline is part of the ritual to go to school. We created a campaign called Love Hurts that really brings to life the memories that people have from their childhood when their parents were really rubbing Vaseline in their face before they go to school.

7:27Leandro Barreto:This observation can be captured by a machine. Parents put Vaseline in the face of their kids. But what this means, because this is a proxy for love, when we talk to the kids, they say, when I remember the hands of my parents in my face, I remember love. That's what love meant to me. That I don't think it can be captured because only humans understand what these rituals, they mean. Once you've identified that this emotion of love and the nostalgia of your parents doing this to you, how did that translate into a marketing program? What did that do for the business of Vaseline? The way this translates into a marketing program for us, first is about the attention awareness is the foundation of the marketing principles, right?

8:21Leandro Barreto:I think when we recognize the relevance of the product in people's lives, we really get back attention. We really get back engagement and people really reignite the conversations that they have had for years about the brand. And it does translate actually in sales. We have seen over time with this campaign that even for a product like Vaseline that's present in so many households, there is the need to refresh the memory structures. And when we bring this with relevance, we can see again the repeat rates going up. So it's a repeatable model of relevance. And increasing growth that you spoke about.

9:04I like that you use the phrase memory structures there. I mean, that has definitely got a neuroscience, scientific, hard science claim to impart to it. But at the same time, you're talking about the love and the emotion and tapping into that. I'm really intrigued at the journey that Unilever has been on and that you're now leading because back in the day, you invented soap operas. Soap operas are called soap operas because of companies like Unilever. TV broadcast, mass reach, tonnage, volume. And then somewhere in the sort of the 2000s, you guys moved into a sort of purpose-built marketing. And the Dove campaign for Real Beauty, I think was an exact example of that.

9:43I guess dirt is good as well. And now you're in somewhere else. And what's your sort of expectation and your perception of what modern marketing means today? And where's Unilever at in that sort of continuation of strategy?

9:56Leandro Barreto:Yeah. So first, I think the marketing fundamentals have not changed. So actually has always been about doing what matters to people, about being relevant and meeting people where they are. So actually, this transformation that you mentioned is nothing else but meeting people where they are. For us, it's really important to be in culture and culture is happening within the communities in social media. So that's why we have made a significant shift to be where people are. We also, of course, understand that's a shift in authority and credibility. It's super important that this is not only what the brand wants to say, but it's also what the people want to say about the brand.

10:44Leandro Barreto:And that's also why we have made a shift to creators, because I think finding those voices that are aligned with our values, aligned with the meaning of the brand that I mentioned before, and giving space for these voices is just part of being relevant. That makes sense. Just on this journey, and let's use Dove. You've ran Dove and still do. What does it mean to be culturally relevant? And I'd love to hear about where you guys didn't quite get it right or where there was a decision made, which was like, you know what? reading relevance, attaching to relevance, attaching to cultural significance is hard.

11:21It's a skill. Where have you got it right? And where did it go wrong? Or where did you have to correct?

11:27Leandro Barreto:So this is a great point. So I've been working with Dove for 15 years, right? And in these 15 years, the most difficult things in Dove were the things you'd say no to, the rigor and the discipline to understand what you stand for and what the conversations you should not participate on is really hard because you can be dragged into spaces that actually at surface level, it looks like the brand should be joining that conversation. But actually, when you look deeply, we have nothing to do there. So what Dove stands for has not changed since 2004 when we launched the campaign for real beauty has always been about giving people a positive experience about the way they look.

12:16Leandro Barreto:And this has not changed at all, but it needs to be in the zeitgeist and be timely. So in the beginning, when this was about representation, was about talking about people being represented in media and advertising, that was the focus. That's how we showed up. When this started to become more about social media toxicity, the impact that was having in young girls in body confidence, we had to talk about building body confidence, self-esteem. And then when the world starts to move more towards joy, right, joy and beauty starts to be very connected in the zeitgeist of today, then we need to celebrate the different forms of beauty.

12:58Leandro Barreto:So the meaning is the same, but the expression of that meaning is actually radically different in each one of the decades that we have been driving the purpose of Dove. Can you talk a little bit about your process, though, in terms of how you help the teams yourself and then what signals and ways of working actually allows you around the world to identify emerging trends, identify whether that fits with your brand values and the process you go through? I think that'd be kind of interesting to hear because you guys are the masters of this. Yeah, we have very clear focus on defining what the brand stands for.

13:35Leandro Barreto:In the past, this was living in books and guidelines as many brands in the world had. Over time, this has evolved in becoming more systems, right? We have what we call now the brand DNAI. So it's a bit of a mix of the old guidelines about what the brand stands for with the usage of technology to actually flex those guardrails or that world building into the signals of what is happening out there. So we use a lot of social listening, a lot of technology to understand the conversations that are happening, the communities that matter to us, and how these conversations track back to the brand positioning.

14:16Leandro Barreto:So we have established this process where we say it's not only about what the brand stands for, but also how the brand shows up. We created in many markets around the world, what we call culture studios. So the people sitting in the market, community managers, social specialists, creator specialists, they are always working in groups and constantly in connection with the conversations that are happening and filtering if these conversations are things we should participate or not. Once they identify that, then the whole process of a brief and content creation takes place. The difference now from before is that this is very fast.

15:02Leandro Barreto:What it took as months now take hours, right? We have a much more agile way to approach content creation that we had before and technology allowed us to do this. Super interesting. we have nano banana inside of google our image generation technology it blew up last year yes right and in large part it blew up because of the work coming out of sort of content creator minded marketers in southeast asia who saw early trends were able to get those trends in front of other sort of influencers and actually scale out and it took over the world it was kind of remarkable seeing that speed of insight but exactly in those areas you're talking about Let me just ask about the Vaseline Verified campaign, right?

15:49As I understand it, and I'll make up the number, but I think I read 300 ,000 creators were activated in some capacity. And what does it mean to activate 300 ,000 creators within a marketing program like brand governance, matching luggage, consistency of tone and voice? How do you even cope with all that?

16:08Leandro Barreto:Yeah, so look, Vaseline Verified was really a game changing for us. It's not just a marketing campaign for Vaseline. It really changed the way we do marketing for our brand. It started with a very simple idea. For many years, we knew people were using Vaseline in different ways, right? Many hacks of Vaseline. People were putting Vaseline in their dog's nose, in their shoes, in their door, in their car. And then when we understood that in many of these conversations, the number one question people were asking was, does it work? So you are telling me you use Vaseline this way, but does it work? Can I really trust?

16:51Leandro Barreto:And then it really clicked because we said, well, there's a role for the brand. We are a science-based brand. We're founded in this idea that Vaseline works. So what if we understand our role, not as creators of messages, but as verifiers of what they are saying? So simple idea, it changed everything because it was the first time, Josh, that creators were pitching to us. So when you talk about the 300 ,000, it's not how we started, right? It started organically with us responding to content that already existed out there. But in the moment people understood they were verifying the content and were talking to people, they start pitching back and say, hey, I have a hack.

17:36Leandro Barreto:Hey, I have the other hack. So the 300 ,000 became really organic influencers and creators. And the more we start understanding the impact they had, then we came with paid media. And then, of course, when you start from earned and then you put paid, then you have a big storm of impact and effect. With hindsight, everything looks amazing, right? So as you went through this process, internally, what was the approval process? I understand you may be giving approval, but you had to explain this to other members of the C-suite. You had to explain this to other important stakeholders inside of ULIN.

18:14Was there resistance there or was it just smooth sailing, like gliding along Vaseline?

18:20Leandro Barreto:There was no resistance. I'm used to resistance. I think there are some ideas that they need to be nurtured very slowly until they can be shown. It's not the case of Vaseline verified. I think it's built from such a relevant truth. I have one silly question, then a proper question. What is your favorite use of Vaseline that you were not aware of that your team then verified? Yeah, there are many, many of them, because you can imagine it's a very fun piece of work. One that I really like is hay fever. It's one that was recognized now by the NHS, so it's in the NHS website. But you know, with pollen, especially during spring, a lot of people suffer with hay fever.

19:05Leandro Barreto:And I didn't know that Vaseline is verified. You can put Vaseline around your nostril and avoid some of the pollen to get in. So it's actually one of the most efficacious ways to avoid hay fever. And I thought this was fascinating. That is very, very interesting. And we should note, the reason you won the Titanium Award at Cannes for all this work is because it increased sales significantly and has done so in a sustained, growing way, right? Which is probably not true for most packaged goods most of the time, right? So significant growth, right? Yeah, significant growth. And it's not only the growth, it's also where the growth came from.

19:42Leandro Barreto:a lot of the growth came from e-commerce. So a lot of the creators were selling Vaseline. They joked they became Vaseline dealers because every time they go into one of the social commerce platforms, they recommend Vaseline, they get a portion of the sales. So having the sales happening through such an important growth channel for us, that is e-commerce, especially social commerce, gave another color to the growth, right? because it showed again that it's making the brand relevant in channels where probably the brand would not be present with the same relevance. New growth opportunities are so important.

20:19And I've heard this from so many guests across this series of podcasts about finding new markets and new audiences you weren't particularly aware of. So let's just take it a little bit wider here. You hire a new vice president or senior marketing person from outside of Unilever and you put them on one of your brands. What is the single mistake they're going to make when they try to copy what you've done with Vaseline and Dove and get to this relevance that just because they're not used to this?

20:46Leandro Barreto:That's a great question, Josh. I think the first mistake is to wanting to participate in culture. I think this became something now that every brand wants to do. So it's like, let me find a cultural moment that I want to participate. It doesn't work this way. I think it really starts from what you stand for. What are the conversations you have authority to join? I think a mistake is believing that we can build worlds. We actually don't build anything. We just join the worlds that communities have already built, right? When we go to games, when we go to NBA, when we go to the Super Bowl, we're not building anything.

21:28We're just joining in a party that is already happening.

21:33Leandro Barreto:And a mistake is believing that we are building or we are creating or we can define the moment. We just need to be very selective to the moment that we have authority to participate. I think that would be my main advice. You need to actually have a reason for being there. Colin and Samir, the two YouTube creators who I interviewed earlier this season of the pod, they talked about you need your brand to become a character in the creator's universe, a character in the universe of the audience you're participating in. You're not trying to become the superhero of that world. You just need to be within that world as one of the characters.