Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan was created
and launched amid much fanfare in 2010. It was lauded for its ambitious goals,
an exhaustive list of metrics and for its commitment to put sustainable and
equitable growth at the heart of its business model.
This week, the consumer products company
released its second progress report and it began with a stark statement from
CEO Paul Polman:
“The world continues to
face big challenges. The lack of access of many to food, nutrition, basic
hygiene and sanitation, clean drinking water or a decent job should be a
concern to all of us. We firmly believe business has a big role to play in
striving for more equitable and sustainable growth, but large-scale change will
only come about if there is real collaboration between companies, governments
and NGOs across all these areas.”
To get started, here are the three overarching
goals Unilever began its Plan with:
1.
Help more than a billion
people take action to improve their health and well-being;
2.
Source 100 percent of
agricultural raw materials sustainably;
3.
Halve the environmental
footprint of its products across the value chain.
Ambition: Sustainability in Perspective
"The report is indicative of what we're
trying to do. We're trying to do things at scale. This is not a [standalone]
CSR project in Africa but something that touches every single element across
our value chain," he began.
It takes a mindset shift to put Unilever's
plan in perspective. As Weed explained, "The idea that it isn’t just about
the footprint of your facilities…we have to think all the way through the
lifecycle of aproduct from consumer to facilities to sourcing to the impact of
key productions. The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan guides our
direction."
Did his team realize the magnanimity of the
goals they were setting? "We knew that we couldn’t achieve all of them but
that if we set them like this, we would find solutions along the way by working
with others," he said, adding, "When you get interconnected,
solutions and opportunities open up. That was the spirit we started with."And the results encapsulated on Unilever's website and a 53-page PDF download, are in keeping with that spirit. "It's not about mechanically ticking off the targets and goals. OurSustainable Living Plan is a movement to get business to move toward socially and environmentally sustainable future," he clarified.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan:
Highlights
First off, he reminds me that from the outset,
the Plan set out the sustainability goals to be achieved alongside the mission
set out in 2009 to double the business. "We serve two billion people a day
and another 2.5 billion are expected to be added to the world's population by
2050. So our goal is to reduce our environmental footprint and increase our
social impact while doubling our business."
The good news: "We have started to drive
sustainability into the core of our business and today, our sustainability
efforts are helping to drive business growth." One example is Unilever's
popular Lifebouy soap, which was rebranded in 2010 with a social purpose
alongside:
"[We went]
from selling soap to encouraging people to wash their hands – and wash them correctly. And our
efforts have resulted in double-digit growth over the last three years – and
reaching millions with our Handwashing campaign. It's proving the coherence of
our strategy of combining social impact with business growth instead of just a
sales goal," Weed explained.
Other examples:
·
Laundry
cleaner: Unilever increased its
market share by 10 percentage points since 2010 to over 25 percent, with its
concentrated liquids, which according to Weed carry a much lower carbon
footprint in production and use.
·
Dry
shampoos: A huge opportunity for
the company, right now dry shampoos are mostly sold in the U.S. – where
Unilever occupies a 75 percent market share. But as the company enters into
more water-restricted countries, Weed predicted an accompanying increase in
sales. The environmental benefit? Compared to heated water, dry shampoo
reduces CO2 by 90 percent through lower water usage and less heating of water
for the shower. An added benefit for developing countries: water conservation.
·
Dove: The Self Esteem campaign continued to gain
momentum with 62 percent of women who know of the campaign now recommending
Dove to others. "The campaign started with the idea that we should think
differently about how we portray beauty," said Weed, "Today, it’s a
global movement."
·
Oral
hygiene: Unilever's oral hygiene
campaign helped its Signal brand grow by 22 percent in 2012. "People brush
their teeth in the morning and evening, which requires more toothpaste, ergo a
virtuous circle," contextualized Weed.
A Twist on Purposeful Cause Marketing?
So cause marketing spelt
and implemented differently. By attaching value and impact with its core
products, Unilever is addressing a question all consumer products companies
continue to struggle with: how do you change consumer behavior to scale
a company's sustainability efforts?
For Unilever, this has meant active pairing of
product and messaging with a focus on impact and growth, yet ultimate success
is far away.
As Weed explained:
"This is a coherent strategy that works –
we're increasing our social impact while growing our business. However, while
we're making good progress, we're still facing challenges across the value
chain, whether its with sourcing, food production or disposal." And each
carries with it a nuanced set of challenges, a complex set of solutions and
invariably a cobweb of marketing, brand positioning and partnerships.
"We have reduced
our CO2 emissions, non-hazardous waste to
landfill has been reduced in 50 percent of our factory sites, we're sourcing
over a third of our agricultural raw material from sustainable sources, up from 14 percent when we started in 2010…yet
we're miles away from our 2020 target of 100 percent," he offered.
Scaling Behavior: Easier Ideated than
Done
Of course, a key ingredient in Unilever's Plan
is the ability to scale. For the world's largest teaproducer, these
achievements might mean small metrics today but when scaled are attribution to
an entire value chain at work on technological improvements, environmental
studies, and more. However, the opportunity is also a challenge:
"The sheer scale of our commitments is
tremendous. For example, we want to be able to educate a billion people by 2020
on washing their hands correctly. That's a lot of people – despite the progress
we've already made since 2010 – 224 million people across 17 countries as of
2012. Scale has been more challenging than we originally thought," Weed
explained.
Another challenge: encouraging people to adopt
new behaviors.
Consumer Behavior: The Toughest
Challenge Yet?
"When someone tells you something about
hygiene, it's easy to do it for a couple of days and then switch back to your
old habits. Habits are hard to change and we're seeing this come up in almost
every initiative," he said.
Using the example of laundry, he exemplified:
"The biggest use of domestic water across
households worldwide is for laundry. Only a few hundred million in North
America use machines. The other billions wash their clothes by hand and usually
use four buckets of water to do so: wash in one, rinse in three. Our challenge
is to reduce that rinsing from three buckets to one. So we came up with a
product that kills the foam – wash in one bucket and rinse in one bucket. Water
used is instantly cut to half. And we expected the product to be a runaway
success."
The team found that
embedding that behavior change of using one bucket instead of three wasinstrumentally
tough. Even in water scarce markets where people have to walk long distances
for water. "Rinsing is hard work. I thought this would be a rapid victory
but we found that it takes time to change habits and we ended up reaching only
29 million households, much lower than anticipated," he recalled.
When your footprint encompasses billions of
culturally diverse populations with very different social and environmental
settings, scale becomes an ever-moving target.
Perhaps Weed puts it best again: "If you
went to work in a Boeing 747, it wouldn’t make a difference to the planet. If
half the planet started doing that, it would make a huge difference. The power
of individuals is when you scale them together."
Its hard work.
And Unilever's 2012 Progress Report while
celebrating the company's achievements does not undercut the challenges ahead.
"We're breaking new ground every day. We're showing results. But there are
several pieces we are yet to crack," said Weed.
