- Unilever shifts marketing focus to what consumers say about brands.
- CMO Leandro Barreto emphasizes the ‘reality first’ approach.
- Brands must create meaningful products worth sharing, not just noise.
Consumer packaged goods major Unilever has reframed the way it builds its biggest consumer brands, shifting the central question of its marketing from what a brand wants to say to what other people want to say about it.This is a change Leandro Barreto, global CMO, Unilever, described as an “operating model” and not a mere slogan.Speaking at Cannes Lions 2026, Barreto argued that the widely reported characterisation of Unilever “going social first” and shifting media budgets toward influencers “missed the point entirely.””It’s not about channels. It never was,” he said, adding, “TV didn’t die. Paid media didn’t die.” The shift, he argued, is in how demand is created. “People act on recommendations from their communities and trust what other people are doing.” He labelled the approach “reality first” rather than “social first.”He set three conditions for the model to work that include “clear meaning,” “a commitment to co-creation,” and “a system designed to back you up”. Without these, he said, brands are “just noise wearing a creator’s face”.Barreto said Vaseline discovered consumers using the product in “hundreds of uses we never intended”, citing marathon runners, public-health recommendations for hay fever and parents applying it to children’s faces and that the company’s initial instinct to “stay in our lane” was wrong.He claimed that Vaseline “partnered” with creators to turn their Vaseline hacks into real products, with creators receiving “a portion of the sales”.He also described a South African ritual in which parents apply Vaseline to children’s faces before they leave for school — rendering a local phrase that translates to “go shine.”Barreto said Hellmann’s partnership formed after NFL quarterback Will Levis was seen on social media adding mayonnaise to his coffee. He said the company formed a collaboration and “made a mayo scented cologne together.”He proceeded to talk about another campaign for Dove “Intense Repair Mask” by committing to publish “the first 50 reviews” from Reddit unedited as the campaign itself.Barreto summarised this new-found approach as the meeting of “poetry and plumbing”. Poetry being consumer intimacy, cultural relevance and creative courage while plumbing being the systems, tools and technology that let a story scale. “Without poetry, nothing matters. Without plumbing, nothing spreads,” he said.He brought the session to a close by making an impassioned plea to the gathering at Cannes Lions. Barreto said, “The creators are our torch barriers. Because the moment nobody carries your fire anymore, the brand might still be visible. You can still buy media, still flood every platform. But something deeper has already disappeared. People stopped caring. And once that happens, no algorithm can save you.”He added, “If this is what you are going through now, you do not have a media problem. You probably have not built something worth sharing. And no media plan can fix that. So that’s why I insist we must build something worth repeating and trust someone else to repeat it. That’s the only way.”
