Case Study - Unilever
Strategy:
Together with the Unilever team, we identified the key issues and subjects to monitor
and enable comparison with peer organisations as: Financial and Management performance,
Performance of top brands and Spokespeople. We then developed the analysis to allow
us to assess where consumer messages were impacting on overall reputation.
Unilever is unique, with products ranging from soap to ice cream, therefore identifying
appropriate peers was not straightforward. We worked closely with Unilever to assess
the peer organisations to evaluate, as the absence of direct competitors could not
be exact. The most appropriate peers were therefore agreed based on those of a similar
size and stature. We also recommended focusing solely on UK broadsheets so that
we could assess the impact on key stakeholders; the most important target audience.
Our strategy was designed to provide Unilever with the opportunity to compare their
reputation against identified peers and provide information about how and where
the impact of consumer messages in corporate coverage was strongest and most effective.
Achieving the objective:
The execution and management of the project were designed to take the pressure off
the busy media team, and our implementation of the project was straightforward and
logical.
Having agreed the peer organisations and key issues to track and sourced the cuttings,
our next step was to assess each item of coverage in terms of its favourability
for Unilever and the six peers. Our methodology is sophisticated in design – in
that it allows us to identify and understand the real strengths and weaknesses in
the coverage – but simple in practice to ensure that the research findings can be
easily transmitted throughout the organisation.
Our bespoke coding protocol allows us to track which issues are generating coverage
and to identify emerging trends and themes. It also enables us to understand the
impact of mixing consumer and corporate messages and to assess how this has affected
overall reputation.
The report is delivered on a quarterly basis and has been designed to reflect specific
areas of interest to the client. Clear charts combined with bullet point commentary
highlight the key events and, by putting the findings into a wider and deeper context,
help the media team to really understand the emerging trends and issues. Our reports
are tailored to give real and specific action points and form part of the quarterly
results feedback.
The ability to take control of the findings is paramount and we encourage greater
independence by providing online access to the data, as well as online charting
which can be customised to suit individual purposes.
Conclusions:
Our analysis has revealed that, overall, favourability of coverage is higher when
corporate and consumer messages are aligned. For Unilever, the mixing of themes
continues to be of benefit and coverage is usually better when compared to coverage
just focusing on corporate messages.
The findings show how Unilever is performing in comparison to peers in terms of
mixing both sets of messages and we help them to understand how and where they are
succeeding. In addition, by placing their own performance into context, the expectations
of the media department can be handled more realistically.
We also provide valuable information about overall reputation and compare Unilever
with the peer organisations. The findings show how and where the strengths and weaknesses
in coverage are impacting on overall reputation and help Unilever to position themselves
against peers. This can help to set achievable and realistic targets.
It is vital to provide reliable and consistent data so event trends can be tracked
accurately and our data provides just this. We not only report on the positive events
driving coverage, but also highlight those events which have had a negative impact
on an organisation and the wider industry too. We provide invaluable information
about how other companies have handled negative events, such as product recalls,
to help shape and focus Unilever’s own crisis communications strategies.
The analysis of key issues enables us to report to Unilever on how the media perception
of financial, management and brand performance compares with their peers. We also
assess the impact of spokesperson comment and ascertain to what extent this has
helped to improve favourability, which Unilever leverage internally to encourage
colleagues to speak to the press.
Our results focus specifically on the key media and provide valuable information
about which media are more likely to write positively about Unilever in comparison
to the other organisations. It is equally as important to understand those media
who are predominantly negative so that they can be targeted with the aim of improving
favourability.
As Trevor Gorin, Head of Unilever Plc and UK Media Relations, puts it:
"Mediatrack has helped us first and foremost to understand how our reputation
compares with our peers and to what extent our strategy of mixing corporate and
consumer messages affects overall reputation. We have used their findings in planning
our strategies and we have found their results to be invaluable in the planning
stages and assessing our successes in the media."