The Lynx Effect: Talking with Simon Clift, CMO, Unilever   

What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve picked up in your marketing career?
To be yourself at work.

What the best decision you’ve ever made?
To get a dog. Second best: getting the next dog.

And the worst?
Lots of poor but gratifyingly unobtrusive ones, I have no doubt. But no blatant, entertainingly massive cock-up springs to mind.

What brand do you most admire and why?
The disappointingly unoriginal but truthful answer is Apple. Based on consumer evidence. This consumer. I go to the Apple store every couple of months and buy everything they’ve launched, and then post-rationalise my needing it.

What’s the biggest challenge facing the marketing industry over the next year?
I suspect the near total meltdown of capitalism as we know it might just pose a couple of interesting challenges to marketers. When we’ve cracked that one, we can get back to the fascinating task of how companies like ours, whose business model has depended on shifting lots of stuff on the back of television advertising (largely) are going to prosper in an era where people are not prepared to be interrupted by uninvited messages.

What achievement are you most proud of in your career?
Having lived and worked and prospered in half a dozen different cultures and languages. Austria to Mexico for example was a pretty radical change. After all Emperor Maximilian came horribly unstuck with that one…

Who is your marketing hero and why?
George Frederic Handel – in the business of filling theatres - for his genius in achieving “great effects by such simple means”, to quote Beethoven – who knew what he was talking about. Contemporary ‘rock star’ marketers are almost always too blatantly flawed as human beings to merit being called heroes.

What marketing lessons did you learn from your time in Latin America that can be applied to the UK?
A belief in the power of brands; an almost childlike optimism in what marketers can achieve with them with a little courage, imagination and when unencumbered with cynicism or self-imposed limitations.

As Unilever’s first CMO how did you create and forge your role?
I’ve had CMO on my business card for three years, but am really only now doing it properly since I gave up my responsibility for running our personal care business. So it’s early days. But my guiding ambition is to make Unilever marketing something that people are unambiguously proud of inside, and that is admired from the outside. It used to be that way twenty or thirty years ago, but in many countries it is less so now. We have all the means to make it so again.

You’re a Unilever lifer. Have you ever been tempted to leave?
It’s not cool, but no I haven’t! I have a low boredom threshold, and 26 years in the same company sounds dull, but nine jobs in five countries has kept it pretty varied.

You clearly have a love affair with Brazil. What do you love about the country?
Deconstructing a love affair is a barren exercise for the outsider. But I know of no foreigner who has lived in Brazil who isn’t in some significant way touched by the experience. I have a lot invested there now, emotionally and otherwise.

To what extent are the consumers of Dove, Flora and Axe aware of the Unilever brand? Do they need to be?
Not much at all at the moment, even if they decipher the blue U on the back of the pack. But it depends what you mean by consumers… You can no longer segment people into consumers, employees, investors, or activists. Information technology has put an end to that. People increasingly want to know who’s behind the brand, and what their position is on the big issues.  The fair trade and environmental movements have shown that people know their rights and obligations as consumers much more than as citizens. They express their views on issues like climate change, human rights, or child labour as consumers of global brands just as much as through governments, political parties or multi-lateral organisations.

How are you looking to develop the Unilever company brand?
The Unilever company brand is an unleveraged asset. We’ve been around for 80 years and we have an excellent social, economic and environmental track record across the world. People are increasingly interested in this. We have headed our sector in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for ten years, for example.  We intend to make this more accessible to people. How better than to do this through the Unilever brand. But the product brands will always be primary. But if you have a great brand from a company you trust, you’re onto a winner.