Watching Unileverโs ๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ฒ live from New York this
By Mert Damlapinar ยท November 8, 2026 ยท Curated by George's Blog
Watching Unileverโs ๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ฒ live from New York this week, one thing became crystal clear: the century-old playbook of selling dish soap, prestige skincare, and mayonnaise under one balance sheet is officially dead.
I loved their "SASSY" philosophy, (Science, Aesthetics, Sensorials, Said by others, Youthful), clearly Unilever has built a high-frequency cultural machine.
Fernando Fernandez, Leandro Barreto and Srinivas Phatak presented a masterclass in with the banner of "Transform and Perform." Following the demerger of Ice Cream and the pending $44.8B combination of Foods with McCormick & Company into a $20B global flavor giant, Unilever has completed an aggressive structural unbundling. What remains is a lean, laser-focused โฌ39B Home & Personal Care (HPC) pureplay engineered for sustained volume growth and expanding gross margins (>48%).
The portfolio discipline on display was surgical.
- Verticals compressed from 16 to 10.
- Brand count halved from ~370 to ~180, slashing 40% of legacy SKUs.
- 25 Power Brands now generate 80% of revenue, running at a 600 bps gross margin premium.
- Anchor markets dialed in: the US and India alone represent 40% of turnover.
Dove is compounding toward $7B+, Vaseline is surging toward $1.5B (up 13% in volume), and digital disruptors like K18 and Dr. Squatch are scaling into global category leaders.
Obviously we're proud to be one of the strongest partners of Unilever to drive growth for the overall business. What resonated most from my vantage point at WPP, is the complete rewiring of their demand creation engine. They shared a reality that every marketer must confront next year: the effective lifespan of digital video creative today is just four days before hitting negative marginal returns.
What stayed with me from their SASSY philosophy and execution.
- Scaling their global creator ecosystem from 20,000 to over 500,000 content creators.
- Deploying proprietary tools like BrandDNAi to generate 12x more content at ~90% lower cost per asset, lifting purchase intent by +23%.
- They're channeling 75% of their โฌ7B media investment into digital and social, utilizing rapid ROI attribution across 44 retail media networks and capturing 50%+ surges in quick commerce.
- They're running AI across 7,000 formulations to develop 3 product briefs, packages, and fragrances overnight.
Srini summarized with clarity when he said "I want to be boringly consistent, because a compounding story is consistently exciting." When you strip away bureaucratic sprawl and fuse relentless capital allocation with predictive, creator-led media, enterprise agility stops being a theory and becomes an operational moat.
My quiet realization as I watched the final slides was, scale without focus is just corporate comfort food. Unilever is proving that real resilience comes from cultural speed, razor-sharp focus, and backing your best bets with uncompromised conviction.#
#FMCG #CPG #Growth #Strategy