Full speed ahead

MORE than a billion people use Unilever products every day. Along with that achievement comes a clear sense of duty to keep doing better, keep taking action, and keep driving towards positive transformation for people and the planet.

With the pressure brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, Unilever's commitments were quickly accelerated, coming to fruition through the support of partnerships and innovations driven by their brands and various business functions - all geared towards staying true to their purpose of making sustainable living commonplace.

Building on the foundations set out by the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan from 2010 to 2020, the Unilever Compass is a fully integrated corporate strategy based on 3 core beliefs: that brands with purpose grow, companies with purpose last, and people with purpose thrive.

Unilever's beauty and personal care division brings the Compass to life with their vision of Positive Beauty. These key innovations were led by Samir Singh, executive vice-president, global skin cleansing and oral care at Unilever, who is based in Singapore and oversees nearly 25 brands responsible for US$10 billion in revenue.

"Over the past year, we doubled down on our efforts towards Positive Beauty for people and the planet, by rolling out a broad range of innovative initiatives that transform systems, policies and norms." he said.

"Our beauty and personal care brands introduced programmes that directly benefit populations throughout the value chain to promote inclusion, health and wellbeing for all."

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Partnerships that drive purpose and encourage positive behaviour change

As part of its brand purpose, Pepsodent, one of Unilever's leading oral care brands, has spent nearly 3 decades bringing good brushing habits to over 25 million Indonesian students with the Pepsodent Brush Day and Night School Programme.

Determined to continue serving students despite school closures last year, Pepsodent is working with Kipin, an edutech startup with expertise in reaching rural communities, with the support of the Ministry of Education in Indonesia.

Kipin is distributing Pepsodent's digitalised version of the on-ground programme via their platform. Next, they empower and train teachers to educate children to brush twice daily, as teachers are uniquely positioned to influence due to their multiplier effect and have the potential to impact future generations.

Over 21 days - the ideal duration to form habits - teachers will show students how to access the content, conduct engaging virtual lessons with quizzes and progress checks, and even involve parents to guide their children and celebrate their success upon completion at home.

High on Unilever's priority list is helping the 5 million small and medium-sized enterprises that play a vital role in bringing Unilever products to consumers. Helping them to harness the benefits of digitalisation would enable them to grow their businesses and become more resilient.

Since 2016, Unilever has run the Apsara Selling With Purpose programme in Cambodia for female micro-merchants in rural areas. They are empowered to promote the Apsara loyalty programme directly to shoppers, thus providing the micro-merchants with sustainable employment and stable income while increasing services to the communities, and benefiting the business by reaching previously uncovered avenues in rural areas.

Starting this year, Unilever is digitalising the entire programme, enabling the micro-merchants to invite shoppers to register to be part of the loyalty programme online, earn points for transactions as well as complete brand questionnaires, and redeem rewards such as samples.

By evolving and digitalising the programme, Unilever is on track to create more than 1,000 jobs for women in Cambodia.

Embedding sustainability-led innovation into every part of the business via partnerships

Unilever became the first commercial partner to team up with Google, for the implementation of its Google search engine.

The partnership lifts Unilever closer to their goals of raising sustainability standards by regenerating nature and ending deforestation in their supply chain by 2023.

By combining the power of cloud computing with Google Earth's ability to map the planet, Unilever could detect deforestation and prioritise areas in need of urgent protection more effectively because they could now store, process and gain insights from vast amounts of complex data.

Unilever is also working to share findings with future partners, and democratise data to put an end to deforestation through collaboration.

Do more to actively bring others along with Unilever

In Singapore, Unilever launched a mentorship programme with high-potential startups in the region in partnership with Enterprise Singapore's SWITCH Mentorship Network.

Unilever employees were intimately involved in guiding 23 selected startups with the ambition to achieve a range of United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals within the next 5 years - for example, cumulatively preventing 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year and enabling child literacy for 10 million children aged 2-10.

This new way of approaching mentorship harnesses the deep experience and talent from Unilever to elevate the sustainability and impact that startups bring to the wider community and the planet.

One of the startups was Zaident, a provider of disruptive machine-learning solution on the cloud. "As a young company, Zaident benefited from the Unilever Mentorship programme immensely as we leveraged our mentor's strong domain knowledge and operational insights to scope and sharpen our business plans and product development," shared Gopal Varutharaju, chief technology officer of Zaident.

Armed with the learnings from the relentless innovations in 2021, Unilever is ready to scale up and create even more significant change.

Dave Ingram, chief procurement officer of Unilever Asia, emphasised: "As a leader in the consumer goods industry, Unilever holds itself to a high benchmark for meaningful growth. "Our ultimate aim is to deliver growth that is profitable, competitive, consistently, and most importantly, responsible. This is essential for us to become leaders in sustainable business together with our partners."

For more of our SWITCH 2021 coverage, go to bt.sg/switch21