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How do you find your brand’s super power? Kathleen Dunlop, Global Brand VP at Unilever, shares the story behind Vaseline’s transformation from a simple medicine cabinet staple to a life-changing tool for refugees, people living in conflict zones, and those affected by natural disasters. Dunlop talks about the insights that lead to the Healing Project, and how the Vaseline brand fits into Unilever’s expanding Sustainable Living products portfolio.
Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Welcome to Purpose three sixty. I'm Carol Nurturing
Chris Noble:Life- And I'm Chris Noble.
Carol Cone:And we're on a journey to explore the brightest and most innovative minds and initiatives in social purpose.
Chris Noble:Today, companies and brands must stand for something meaningful. They have to have a social purpose and bring that purpose forward to their employees, their customers, and their community.
Carol Cone:Each episode, we're talking to leaders at Fortune 100 companies, global brands, social enterprise startups, NGOs, and everything in between.
Chris Noble:We'll be taking a deep dive to learn how they are integrating purpose into their organizations.
Carol Cone:To benefit both business and society for enduring impact. Join us. Welcome to Purpose three sixty. With me today is Kathleen Dunlop from Unilever. And Kathleen is, I just like to say a rock star in the field of social purpose and integrating very authentic work into the business, the brand, society.
Carol Cone:And Kathleen, congratulations. It's an anniversary for you. It's twenty years with Unilever from September 1. And I, you know, we see your fabulous picture and you must have started when you were 15.
Kathleen Dunlop:Thank you, Carol. Yes, twenty years. That's quite a milestone. And I never thought twenty years ago that I would be called a rock star. So thank
Carol Cone:you for that as well. Well, you are. And we are going to delight our listeners today with your most recent success, the Vaseline Healing Project. And for transparency, I'd just like to say I had the joy of working with Kathleen and her team at the beginning of this initiative. She's taken it very far and we're gonna get into it today.
Carol Cone:But Kathleen, can you just talk a little bit about your trajectory at Unilever, your various roles and even you're a globalist. I mean, you've been all around the globe. So, you know, share with the listeners, your not for profit journey, your MBA, and then your twenty years at Unilever. So, yeah, I majored in international policy and did a master's degree actually in international policy at Stanford and wanted to
Kathleen Dunlop:go overseas and do development work, and that's what I did. I ended up working for one of the Rockefeller foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and then went and worked for one of their grantees in Poland. So I worked for an organization that was doing micro lending for women starting their own businesses. And this was right after the fall of communism, So quite a while ago now. And after doing that for a couple years living in Warsaw, I realized that in order to advise people who were starting their own businesses properly, I really needed to have a bit more business understanding myself.
Kathleen Dunlop:So that's what took me to business school. And I expected to do an MBA in not for profit management which Kellogg has a big specialty in. And when I got there, I realized that I actually knew a lot of that already from working in nonprofits for a few years. And I got a degree in marketing instead. And after graduating, I decided to do two to five years, that was my horizon, at a business doing marketing.
Kathleen Dunlop:And that's when I joined Unilever. And then I thought after that, would leave and go back to the NGO world. So it was 2003 and I was still at Unilever. I've been there five years and I was given the opportunity to go abroad. So I said, well, I'll just do this one thing before I leave.
Kathleen Dunlop:So I went to London. And, again, my time horizon was about two years. I ended up staying five in London and then moved to Shanghai for a couple years and then back to London. And finally in 2013, back to The US. And now I wouldn't dream of leaving Unilever because of the Unilever sustainable living plan, which has given me the resources and the might of an organization like Unilever to do the kinds of things that I first dreamt of doing at nonprofits.
Kathleen Dunlop:So that's the that's the sort of short history of twenty years at Unilever.
Carol Cone:And you have three beautiful children. And I know that in a previous interview, you know, you said, you know, find your reason to be at work because, you know, it takes a lot to leave those beautiful children. And what are some of the special essences and policies at Unilever? Now we hear a lot about them on the outside, but you've lived it and breathed it. And and what really contributes to your personal wellness and satisfaction at work?
Kathleen Dunlop:So I have yes. I have three beautiful children. I have two girls. The the oldest and the middle one are both girls. And when I see people, see mothers, working mothers struggling with do I stay at work or do I stay home with my kids, my my personal, you know, narrative in my head, dialogue with myself in my head has been, well, here I am wanting the best for them, wanting them to do well in school, to find what they're passionate about, and find what they love.
Kathleen Dunlop:And for me, that's not staying at home, you know. So I have to be a role model for my daughters as well and for my boy too. But I think especially for my daughters, I'm still at work partly because I wanna be a good role model for them. And then I'm doing things that I do love and I can tell stories about it at dinner time with my kids and I can talk about going to Jordan to a refugee camp as part of the Vaseline Healing Project and going to Nepal to support our dermatologists doing work there. So I've had some really exciting trips that have also been an education for my kids.
Kathleen Dunlop:So I try to weave having a family and work together.
Carol Cone:That's very well stated and thank you for sharing that personal insight. Let's jump into the Vaseline Healing Project. Vaseline is something that we all grew up with. We all have that tub of various sizes either in our, you know, under the sink, over the sink or such, but we don't think that much about it. It's just there.
Carol Cone:What led you as a leader in that business to say this needs to be the next Unilever purpose filled product and talk about the journey, especially for our listeners who may have an ordinary everyday product but you found the superhuman power in it. So talk to us about your journey.
Kathleen Dunlop:So I guess, first off working at Unilever and working on a big brand at Unilever, we have because of the Unilever sustainable living plan, we have the permission to on every brand to define what is going to be our social mission, what's going to be the way that we as a brand give back to the world, whether that's environmental sustainability, whether that is improving people's livelihoods, whether that in the area of improving health and well-being, which is the area that the healing project's in. So we've got that permission. In fact, I we've got that mandate from Paul Pullman down in the organization. So that's a huge that's a huge barrier for us that's removed that maybe brands in other organizations face. And so with that kind of context at Unilever, the Vaseline team set out to figure out what can be the thing that we do that's authentic to what the brand stands for, that's related to what the product actually does, and that will help us to make the world a better place.
Kathleen Dunlop:And we work together on this actually, Carol. So you were there in some of the early days of the Vaseline Healing Project. We did we did a bunch of exploratory interviews with various organizations to understand how our product was being used. And at the time, we had an advertising campaign that ended with the healing power of Vaseline. In fact, it's still our tagline today.
Kathleen Dunlop:And so we asked ourselves and we asked these other organizations, where is that healing power of Vaseline required? And we turned our tagline into a question and we went out looking for, you know, where is the place where our product can make a difference and where what our brand stands for, which is healing, is needed. And we very quickly discovered from talking with organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Centers for Disease Control, UNHCR, that Vaseline, this very humble product that as you said everyone has in their bathroom cupboard under their bathroom sink and doesn't think about very much, it is one of the elements that the CDC recommends be in every first aid kit. It's one of the products that Doctors Without Borders uses in their field hospitals especially for mothers giving birth, both for the mother and for the baby to protect the baby's vulnerable skin. It is, well actually it was talking with UNHCR that we discovered that skin issues are one of the top 10 medical concerns that they see in refugee camps.
Kathleen Dunlop:And in retrospect, it kind of makes sense because people are living in very crowded conditions often without access to clean water and it's very easy for disease to pass from one person to another in those kinds of situations. And skin, if you can't keep it clean, if it's been exposed to the elements, if you've got cuts and scrapes that get infected, skin very quickly becomes one of the things that needs medical attention. And so all of this sort of came together to create a concept that we called frontline healing. And we define Vaseline's frontline as anywhere that there were skin issues that our product could help. That was about March to May 2014 and about a month later, two months later, an article came out in the Washington Post that was written by two dermatologists who had just traveled to Jordan to work in a refugee camp there, a refugee camp for refugees from Syria.
Kathleen Dunlop:When they came back, they wrote about their experience there and one of the things that they said was it never occurred to us to prioritize Vaseline and it called us out by name, the brand name. And we were sent that article by lots of people all over the world who saw it and said, we doing something? And we said, actually we are. We already have this idea and we know that our product is needed and we immediately got in touch with those two dermatologists. We invited them to be on our advisory board.
Kathleen Dunlop:They're still on our advisory board today and they helped us then fine tune what the Vaseline Healing Project is. You know, it's a partnership now with an international medical aid organization called Direct Relief that reaches people living on our frontline, Vaseline's frontline. And these are people who are affected by natural disaster, conflict or extreme poverty and so they're living without access to basic necessities like clean water, shelter or food. And living in these kinds of conditions gives rise to other problems that we wouldn't necessarily expect, the sort of skin problems that I was mentioning earlier. And we donate our products, we send dermatologists to these places and we sponsor medical missions in order to reach as many people as possible living in these vulnerable conditions all over the world.
Kathleen Dunlop:So Direct Relief is helping us to be in 52 countries worldwide.
Carol Cone:And they're terrific, NGO. I know that we talked about them in the past. We had recommended them to work with Western Union on some in some previous years and so I know I know that, you've stated in other, talks that Unilever isn't the expert in this area and that it's really important to listen to your NGO partner. You talk about them being a good partner and you're being a good partner. Can you expand upon that a bit more?
Carol Cone:Because I know that companies have to have the humility to recognize what they know and what they don't know. So what are some of the other secret ingredients to making a partnership work?
Kathleen Dunlop:Yeah. So I think the first is that mutual respect that you just alluded to and recognizing where they are the expert and we need to be equal partners with them to craft this program and make sure that it's beneficial for them as well as for us. And the way we work on our marketing campaigns, for example, you know, we we write a brief. We brief our agency. We are paying for it.
Kathleen Dunlop:You know, at the end of the day, we're the decision maker because we're holding the budget. Of course, we work with our agencies with mutual respect as well. It's good to hear. Right? So there's it's not quite an equal relationship.
Kathleen Dunlop:With direct relief, it absolutely has to be an equal relationship. And as soon as it doesn't work for them anymore, their their entire organization is built on their reputation. And they have a very strong reputation. They're probably the biggest aid organization that you've never heard of because they work behind the scenes with companies like ours and they take a lot of donations in kind and distribute it all over the world. So they work with FedEx.
Kathleen Dunlop:They work with Virgin. They work with SAP which is the same logistics software that we run at Unilever. And all of this is donated to them but they use FedEx to ship products all over. They use SAP to run their logistics. So they really understand companies.
Kathleen Dunlop:They know what we're looking for. They know how to work with us. But then we have to sit back and say, although we're really good at shipping our product all over the world where it needs to go for sale, we're not good at getting our product into disaster areas. So after the big earthquake in Nepal a couple years ago, we had a whole lot of products sitting with direct relief in their warehouse and they were one of the few organizations that were able to actually get it in to Nepal when the airport in Kathmandu was closed. They drove it across from the Indian border into Nepal because they had an organization on the ground that could do that.
Kathleen Dunlop:Unilever couldn't do that at the time because everything was closed to us. But the experts in direct relief were able to make it happen. So that's where we have to let them have free rein. And it's been a very great partnership. They're wonderful people.
Kathleen Dunlop:It really gives you perspective when, you know, some of the things that I worry about in the day and then I have a call with them and they're preparing for the latest hurricane to make landfall and you think, wow, they're really saving lives.
Carol Cone:So that mutual respect is really key to develop a relationship so that it's like I talk about Fred and Ginger, you can both dance forward or backward interchangeably.
Kathleen Dunlop:Absolutely, absolutely.
Carol Cone:You also talk about, the power of being on the ground and that you took a seminal trip to Jordan to a refugee camp and that really touched your heart which you talk about that makes you a better professional in terms of doing this work. Can you please share that with our listeners?
Kathleen Dunlop:Sure. So it was the first medical mission that we sponsored as the healing project. We sent those two dermatologists, Doctor. Grace Bandel and Doctor. Samur Japberg back to Jordan for six days and in the course of six days, I think we saw about 3,000 patients.
Kathleen Dunlop:I got to go along as part of their support crew and we went to Al Zaatui Refugee Camp which is the largest of the refugee camps Plus we went to some medical centers throughout the country where there are a lot of refugees living outside the camps. And it was it was incredibly eye opening for me. First of all, it gave me that firsthand appreciation of what we could do. I had been in the core team from the beginning of crafting what the healing project was about. I absolutely believed in it and knew that we could make a positive difference.
Kathleen Dunlop:But seeing it firsthand, hearing people's stories and seeing how grateful they were to us for this very simple product, the very simple thing of just having a doctor listen to you and take you seriously and treat your ills was returning dignity to them that had been stripped away as part of being a refugee and having to leave home and losing and leaving everything behind. So that was very humbling for me personally, but it also gave me a real sense of the difference that we could make. However small, we couldn't solve the problem of the refugee crisis. We couldn't. We weren't peacemakers.
Kathleen Dunlop:We couldn't solve the civil war. They're very complex issues in the region. But we could do this one small thing that was having an enormous difference in people's lives. And then I was able to come back into Unilever, back to the Vaseline team and tell those stories. And that personal conviction I think carried a lot of weight in telling these stories throughout the organization and speaking to people's hearts and getting people's hearts first before then selling them on the the rational side of why should we do this?
Kathleen Dunlop:What's it gonna be in it for the brand and for the business? I think it's So that trip was incredibly important to be able to come back and speak with real conviction about the healing project.
Carol Cone:And I think what you touched upon was that you played your role, that it was a big role in a narrow place in terms of truly helping people who were hurting, who had walked miles and miles and miles, who are displaced. And that's a really important insight for our listeners. I'd also like you to talk about storytelling because finding that story, giving sharing it to with your consumers or your colleagues at work or others why they should care. Can you talk a little bit about, that young lady, Rheem, that you mentioned at Sustainable Brands?
Kathleen Dunlop:So let let me start first with what you were saying before. The the really important lesson I think is about focus. So defining why the brand is involved with this, what are the boundaries of what you're going to do in terms of social impact and then sticking with that. So by defining Vaseline's frontline as the skin issues in all of these different kind of situations, whether it's natural disasters or refugee camps or people living in extreme poverty in places where they don't have access to medical care, That the defining our frontline as the skin issues really help give us focus so that immediately after going to Jordan, I started getting lots of requests for, can you sponsor this artist's work on, you know, that is that is telling the plight of refugees in Jordan or Lebanon or wherever? I would get countless requests to sponsor all sorts of things that were very good causes that I hated to say no to but really had nothing to do with skin.
Kathleen Dunlop:So they had nothing to do with what our product does and what we as a brand stand for. And so I could very clearly say, no. You know, you're doing wonderful work. Keep on. But no, that's not our area of expertise.
Kathleen Dunlop:So that made it a lot easier to sort of focus what we were about. And it means that our product is right at the center of everything that we're doing with the Healing Project and so it's more sustainable long term because it's connected to what our product does. Our product's right at the center which means every time we communicate the Healing Project, we're communicating the product. And that makes it easier to put brand investment behind something like the Healing Project. It's not this extra thing on top.
Kathleen Dunlop:It's actually fundamental to what our product does and therefore fundamental to communicating to our consumers about what our product does. So it's made it so much easier to invest in a social program like the Healing Project because our product's at the center.
Carol Cone:We always like to say that focus is your friend and it really does allow you to say yes and allows you to say no. Let's talk about communications because so many great social initiatives, you know, well constructed, great partners and such, but they just don't break through in communications. And you made a very important point about that when it is core to the product, you can bring it into the brand, there's greater resources. Can you talk about the communication strategy and truly because you did break through in a significant way? So you you opened this conversation talking about our our core insight actually that that led to the ultimate communications campaign, which was
Kathleen Dunlop:everybody has a little tub of Vaseline jelly somewhere under their bathroom cupboard, in their under their bathroom sink, in their bathroom cupboard, kind of maybe forgotten even that they pull out every once in a while but don't think about it very much. And it's that ubiquity of our product, that very ordinary product that in our communications campaign, we then juxtaposed with the very surprising ways that it's being used to change people's lives in areas of disaster, and extreme poverty. So our launch film was literally a split screen that was juxtaposing those ordinary uses at home with these extraordinary uses in places of disaster and conflict. And that really broke through because it was a true insight and it was playing on the surprise of I had no idea it was used that way. But every frame of that film, in fact, it's a split frame, split screen so there are two frames in every frame of the film has our product in it being used on lips, on elbows, on feet, on hands.
Kathleen Dunlop:So it was a very functional film in that way reminding people of all the different ways you can use this product but a very emotional film because you're seeing my own use of it, you know, maybe on my baby or on my children's skin, knees or elbow with a doctor in a refugee camp or at a clinic in Kenya or a clinic in The Philippines using it on people who don't have access. You know, we take it for granted but they can't. So, very emotional connection that runs right through the product And that proved to be a very compelling campaign by all of the normal measures that we use for measuring the effectiveness of marketing.
Carol Cone:And I know that you won an Effie for this.
Kathleen Dunlop:We won an Effie. Yes. We got a silver Effie for it. And we put it to the test all the same ways that we test our other product news. So we do pre testing and we do qualitative testing with consumers and we did all of that on this film as well and we got outstanding scores.
Kathleen Dunlop:So I guess another lesson that I would, you know, encourage people to not be afraid to test it in exactly the same way. In fact, we've found over and over again that our communications coming out of The Healing Project are even more effective than our traditional marketing.
Carol Cone:And you've mentioned that, you know, you're getting people to feel proud and fall in love with the brand again. Can you tell that little story about, I think it was a consumer that sent you a letter about how they felt about Vaseline after they saw the, the TV spot?
Kathleen Dunlop:Right. It was in a focus group actually.
Carol Cone:Okay.
Kathleen Dunlop:And, you know, the focus group is set up so you're sitting behind a mirror so they can't see you and we showed the split screen film and afterwards the room was silent and this one woman said, wow, that makes me want to take that little tub of Vaseline that I have kind of in the back of my medicine cabinet and pull it out towards the front so that every day when I open my medicine cabinet, I see it right there in front of me. And that's kind of the holy grail of marketing. Here's this product that everyone has. What we need to do is get them to use it more often and by loving our films so much and wanting to see it and be reminded of that right in front of her every day, of course, that's good also remind her to use it. So that was that was the the holy grail that we were going for right there.
Carol Cone:And what's it like to I know that you've been recognized that Unilever is one of the marketing heroes, and there's this little video about you. But what's it like to be in this it's kind of a being in a family of everyone's gotten 800 on their SATs, and they're all, you know, super achievers. So what's it like when you get together with your colleagues who might be running the the Life- Boy campaign or Dove or other of the just outstanding social purpose initiatives?
Kathleen Dunlop:So it is an ever growing group of people working on lots of brands now across the company that are defining their social purpose and developing programs around it and developing marketing around it. So that's all incredibly encouraging to see that group widening because it means that it's really embedded in the organization now and we're proving the business model. It's not just, yes, we should do this because it's the right thing to do, but it's really paying back to the business. And more and more brands doing it is just proving that business model over and over. But even at Unilever where as I said before, we have not just permission but almost a mandate to go do this, we still run into hurdles.
Kathleen Dunlop:We still have to prioritize our investments, our marketing investments and do we talk about our new launch this year or do we talk about what we're continuing to do in the Vaseline Healing Project? So it's really important I think for the brands that are doing this to get together and share their learnings because we need to make the right decisions. We need to manage, navigate these trade offs. We don't have unlimited budgets. We can't do this to the exclusion of everything else.
Kathleen Dunlop:But yet we're proving over and over again that this is some of the most effective marketing that we can do.
Carol Cone:And certainly, think wasn't the turnover that that sustainable brands that Unilever delivered 70% of your turnover growth in the past year?
Kathleen Dunlop:Yeah. So the the sustainable living brands, the ones that have a well defined social purpose or an environmental, you know, sustainability program are delivering the majority of our growth. Absolutely. And I think that is because Yeah. This is some of the best marketing that we can do.
Kathleen Dunlop:It is the most interesting space to be in. We can tell stories about making a difference to the planet and to the people on this planet. And that makes the viewer or consumer feel something, you know, and that is that's great marketing when you can make someone feel something and that brings them closer to your brand and builds loyalty. So I think that it's no surprise, so there's no coincidence that the sustainable living brands are driving the growth because we're doing some of the best marketing on the sustainable living brands. Life- Boy, you know, a child reach five because by washing your hands with soap, you're preventing instances of diarrhea which is one of the biggest killers of children before the age of five.
Kathleen Dunlop:We're literally saving people's lives, children's lives. Imagine the stories that you can tell, the poignant stories from a mother's perspective that you can tell on that brand. Of course, it's great marketing. I think this has unleashed you know a level of marketing in Unilever that we hadn't seen before.
Carol Cone:We're going to have to break now because this is such an amazing conversation. Kathleen Dunlop, you are such a superstar. I can understand, you know, why you got your recent promotion at Unilever. You bring such commitment to your work, authenticity, as well as your heart, to make the Vaseline Healing Project, perform again and again, both for the business and for its recipients. So we're going to break this interview into two episodes.
Carol Cone:We'll be back next week with more from Kathleen on when and how brands should take a stand on issues, scaling and evolving their programs and her advice for other social purpose practitioners. So tune in next week, Kathleen Dunlop, the creator, the developer, and I'll call her the mother of the Vaseline Healing Project.