Who They Are—Diversity, Inclusion, and Parity

As discussed in the last chapter, inclusion is one of those elephants you need to face, and it’s core to business success—a company and culture that serves the world needs to look like the world. We want to focus briefly here on how the right culture feeds diversity … and how diversity drives culture.

Without broad representation in the business, a company is more likely to show insensitivity or lack of awareness. Unilever has made some mistakes. A Dove ad for body wash showed a Black woman who removed a brown shirt and turned into a white woman in a light-colored shirt. It wasn’t the intention of either Unilever or the ad agency to indicate that after using the body wash, the preferred state equated with being white. But mistakes like this are more likely to be caught with the right mix of people in the room.

A diverse and welcoming company changes the culture and the people in it. Total inclusion lets people flourish with no barriers and no biases in hiring and promotion. They are respected and treated with dignity. Many people tell us how much they’ve learned seeing the openness and tolerance at Unilever on gay rights and marriage (which is illegal in many markets). The extensive efforts Unilever made on gender parity also changed internal attitudes toward women—you know, the people that make up 70 to 80 percent of Unilever’s consumers. Paying women the same makes it clear to your employees what you value. And hiring from the large, qualified pool of disabled people sends a message internally about valuing everyone.

Diversity efforts shouldn’t be as hard as companies make them out to be. Good leaders make parity happen. When Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau built his first cabinet in 2015, he fielded a question from a reporter asking why it was 50 percent women. Quite literally, his entire answer was “Because it’s 2015.”

When Unilever built a new toothpaste plant in Ethiopia, they hired an all-female workforce. The factory was meant to help local communities, but it was also a culture-building effort to challenge people. As the managing director for Unilever Ethiopia, Tim Kleinebenne, says, “We were trying to break down limiting beliefs” about women in society and as employees. Unilever’s personal care factory in Haridwar, India, is also all-female—even as CEO, Paul had to get permission to enter the building.

Inclusion initiatives for gender, race, sexuality, and abilities can take companies too long if they’re forced or don’t fit the values. Unconscious bias is a cultural problem. Real skeptics are dying out, but many still ask about the value of diversity. This should be treated, vocally, as an absurd question—that reaction will also send a message about values and culture. Ask them: Why do we have to prove that having more women is a good thing? What’s the business case for all men? It’s silly because the proof is there. A Goldman Sachs study found that the stock prices of companies with more women in management and on boards rose 2.5 percent per year faster than at male-dominated companies.⁶ There’s always a challenge of causation versus correlation, but Bloomberg believes in the data. In 2021, the company launched a Gender-Equity Index (with 380 companies in forty-four countries) to “track the financial performance of public companies most committed to gender equality.”⁷ These financial giants are helping shift thinking to see equality as an opportunity, not a burden.

Diversity also creates more open attitudes and wider perspectives, which is essential in a global company. People who don’t enjoy understanding different national cultures and markets, or don’t embrace diversity, don’t belong in a place like Unilever. There are not many xenophobes in a successful multinational.

Who They Can Be—Purpose and Empathy

Employees with a dated view of a business stand in the way of a culture shift toward net positive. But they can evolve. Doing the work to discover personal purpose, and its connection to the organization’s mission and soul, is an important step. The extensive purpose work that the Unilever leadership team went through (chapter 3) was a turning point. The organization increased its commitment to serving the world. Now that sixty thousand employees have gone through a similar process, having a personal purpose is an important part of the culture. The multiple layers of purpose—individual, brand, and company—reinforce one another.

They don’t all have to be the same, however. Jonathan Atwood, the former VP of sustainable living and corporate communications for Unilever North America, says the personal purpose is the glue that holds the whole thing together and is the real unlock for the organization. The company becomes an amalgamation of individuals with their own purpose. They can put their own twist on it, but they still need to align with the company’s overall purpose and have a commitment to serving the world. That may require helping employees develop empathy and understanding. Hindustan Unilever has a powerful way to do that.

In India, most new management hires come from top schools and from cities. They are urbanites. But 40 percent of Hindustan Unilever’s sales come from the rural areas that make up two-thirds of the country. So, the company sends new hires to live with a rural family for four to six weeks. They bring no money and live as their hosts do. Sanjiv Mehta, the chairman and managing director of Hindustan Unilever, says the program helps people develop a deep understanding of the life of a rural Indian and how the local economy works. It also, he says, “makes you empathize much more with your consumers … and that makes you grounded.” Giving managers an outside-in view broadens their thinking and makes the business more human. The program has deeply affected people.

Thirteen years before he was running the Lifebuoy brand, Samir Singh was new to the company and was sent to live with a family in a remote village in India. There was no power, no toilets, and it was very cold. He shared a room with a buffalo for six weeks. Today, whenever he faces a decision about a brand that serves rural consumers, he says, “I go back to those days and the everyday reality of people’s lives—so different from our romantic notions of idyllic village life. This is what keeps me real and grounded.”

Imagine being a new hire and having that experience (with or without the buffalo). If it changes you, you will help build a culture that serves consumers and values deep understanding and empathy. If it’s not your thing, you don’t last long. Either way, the program creates a consistent culture. It’s one reason Unilever brought back consumer immersion and customer development training for all. It’s an important way to bring an outside-in perspective and remind everyone to take a broader view.

A net positive culture also has to value long-term thinking over short-term profit maximization. Making that shift is not easy in any sector, and the existing culture can push back powerfully. Hiro Mizuno led the world’s largest pension fund, GPIF, for the Japanese government. Mizuno shook up the $1.5 trillion fund when he brought a focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance into the core of its investing strategy. With that much money under management, his fund couldn’t do well unless society did well—his first priority for returns was to ensure that the world thrived. Mizuno knew that managing ESG well was core to that goal. He took heat from the media for the new focus, so you might think that managing outside pressure was his biggest struggle. Instead, he says, “the people who pushed back the hardest were in my own investment team [and its governance body].”

Mizuno almost gave up and then realized he could bring other stakeholders to bear—especially those who want pension managers to avoid risk. He reached out to the biggest pension contributors, the unions, and asked them to embrace ESG as a way to both create long-term value and build the inclusive society they advocated for. As GPIF customers, unions then put pressure on Mizuno’s own asset managers. He also worked with the business and political media, holding events to change views and make ESG a buzzword. The more normalized it became, the less asset managers could drag their feet.

A combination of personal purpose work, redefining roles, and external pressure can unleash a better, more empathetic and productive culture and workforce.

What They’re Rewarded For (Encouraging Net Positive Behavior)

For a number of years, Unilever had no link between the USLP’s goals and bonus compensation. The thinking was that you shouldn’t have to pay people to do the right things. Why give a bonus to a factory manager for a good safety record or to a brand executive for improving racial diversity? These things should come from cultural values of dignity and respect. That’s how you embed the right culture, even if it takes longer. (It may be more of an American concept to just throw money at something to fix it.)

Financial motivation is a blunt force instrument that outsources a leader’s responsibility to inspire people in a deeper way. Money is a poor tool for that. If a doctor hands you a bill for treating your cancer, you don’t say, I’ll pay you 50 percent more to make sure I stay alive. For most doctors, as long as they make a fair amount for the service, money isn’t a motivation. For those with a net positive view, purpose and mission are the core goals, not profit.

It’s the same in business. Bonuses at lower levels may be an important motivation. But for most, and especially senior managers and executives, the drive will not be monetary, so long as they are fairly paid compared to other companies and versus colleagues (which is why a gender pay gap is totally unacceptable). Unilever harmonized the performance management system and made salaries more uniform globally so everyone was on the same footing.

If basic financial commitments and fairness are met, then money does not keep people around. People ultimately stay because they buy into the purpose, they feel they can make a difference, their work matters, they’re being heard, and they can develop themselves to their fullest potential. They also need a good relationship with their managers—people don’t quit companies, they quit bosses.

You can reward people for success and net positive work, but it doesn’t have to be a targeted, separate bonus. Assess people on their values and behavior, giving multiple dimensions of performance weight. The better performers should rise through the ranks. If a factory head gets to zero waste and is performing better, or a buyer hits a sustainable sourcing target quickly and in an innovative way, give them a promotion, more responsibility, and more salary (a permanent shift in competition). Those who don’t share the values and commitment to sustainable performance will get the message—they don’t belong there anyway.

If you pay just for specific metrics, it might narrow the focus in an unhelpful way. Pay people for gender diversity and climate, for example, and you may lose focus on other elements of a multistakeholder, long-term-value approach to business (such as human rights or biodiversity). At nutrition company DSM, 50 percent of the executive bonus was once based on being number one in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for its sector. That’s too narrow for running a business. When DSM fell to number two, it decided to stop chasing rankings. The goal should be holistic, systems-based leadership, not managing to narrow measures or some outside ranking.

Even though Unilever did not pay directly for specific sustainability metrics, the company did measure success against key performance indicators and hold people accountable. Tracking progress was more a conversation than a scorecard. Management sat down quarterly to look at progress on issues like diversity and flag the departments or functions that were lagging. The leadership met with procurement, for example, every few months to discuss progress and look at metrics such as water use, waste, energy, and sustainable sourcing.

Unilever developed benchmarking and real-time data for transparency, identifying high performers and letting people see their progress. These methods were better for engraining the USLP principles into the culture. At the end of Paul’s tenure, the company did add sustainability performance to incentive compensation for the top 100 executives. The board requested it to maintain focus on driving business results through the USLP.

With broader reporting and increased understanding of materiality issues in the investment community, we will see more companies making ESG performance a direct part of compensation. That’s fine, but in the end, if people are not bought in and aligned, the incentive pay won’t matter much.

Net Positive Finance and Budgeting

Purpose-driven brand projects, such as Lifebuoy’s global hand-washing programs, will pay back in brand value and increased sales, but there is a cost. Investments in facilities to help countries develop take a lot of capital. So, net positive budgeting is a structural culture issue. Unilever brands find the money for these investments, in part, by not treating a purpose-led initiative like something that requires a separate budget. If it’s seen as part of doing business, it may be included in the marketing budget or in capital expenditures.

Net positive companies break up mental and organizational silos and look at things holistically. A zero-waste factory may cost more up front, but it yields higher quality, less waste, better corporate reputation, and much more. Investing in living wages, or reducing contingent labor in the supply chain and adding people to the payroll, raises costs in the short run. But lower turnover and higher productivity pay back.

In the trenches, you have to give managers ownership of more of the business and its P&L, so they can allocate funds as they need to. When Unilever first considered putting solar panels on factories, the head of manufacturing faced a hit to the capital budget. But he also had responsibility for the electricity bill and costs (including a price on carbon). He had to develop five- and ten-year risk plans that included the environmental impacts of the factory on communities. With that broader perspective, he could take a holistic view and make better, well-rounded choices (they put up the solar panels).

Sanjiv Mehta from Hindustan Unilever, talking about budgets and water availability, says, “If you come from a perspective that without water, there’s no business, why wouldn’t you spend money on projects to protect that resource and the future of the business?” Making these investments the normal way of doing business stems from and reinforces a culture of purpose. Mehta also says that if you want to be part of the solution, “you will find the money.”

It’s a leadership and organizational decision to give people the freedom to work for the long term (not reporting quarterly gives them that space). It helps your people step back and see the forest from the trees.

Net Positive R&D

The USLP brought an outside-in perspective to innovation. An understanding of planetary boundaries, and how they affect people in the real world, helps researchers identify needs to fill and opportunities to rethink products. To make sure that brands and R&D were in sync and serving the USLP, Unilever embedded a director of R&D with brand teams. It was another way to break down silos, make innovation more relevant, and get to market faster.

For example, brand managers who worked on the Lifebuoy hand-washing initiative identified a challenge that a product innovation might fix. The program teaches kids to wash their hands for thirty seconds. But in some locations, there may not be enough water for every kid to wash for that long. And they’re kids, so they may not stay put for thirty seconds anyway. Fixing these issues, the brand managers believed, would help Unilever achieve the USLP goals on human well-being.

Geneviève Berger, the head of Unilever R&D at the time, tasked the Lifebuoy team with finding a way to kill germs faster. They identified a combination of molecules from natural ingredients (thyme and pine trees) which could kill E. coli and other germs on hands in just ten seconds of washing. That assignment to “fix” Lifebuoy was not a one-off. To build net positive thinking into the organization, Unilever was using a “green funnel” in R&D, a step in the process to formally include environmental and social needs. New innovations had to add to margins and pass the funnel.

Another one of Unilever’s chief R&D officers, David Blanchard, established an annual Green Funnel Review that helped researchers from different product categories share knowledge about new products, technology platforms, and challenges that consumers faced around the world. For example, in many communities where people wash clothes in a bucket—and may walk miles to get water—it took one bucket to wash the clothes and six more to rinse them. So, at a Green Funnel Review meeting, the laundry team set up six buckets of water and asked both the marketing and R&D teams to carry them to another room, telling them, “This is what we’re trying to solve for.” It gave the teams a sense of urgency and empathy. They developed a new “one-rinse” technology, which reduced soap foam quickly so people in water-stressed areas could rinse their clothes with much less water. Seeing this innovation, brand managers from personal care asked whether the new technology could cut rinsing time in soaps and shampoos in showers as well. The technology made its way into other brands.

Of course the Green Funnel process did not always produce winners. The teams were sure that a new compressed deodorant, which reduced packaging volume and shipping emissions, would be, as Blanchard says, “a slam dunk.” But consumers thought they were getting less product and didn’t buy it. Lesson learned. With embedded R&D, brand teams learn from failure more quickly as well.

M&A: Culture Is an Inside Job

As the USLP gained steam and the business grew, Unilever accelerated its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. During Paul’s tenure, they sold fifty-two brands and bought sixty-five—far more M&A activity than in the previous twenty years—and dramatically shifted the portfolio to position Unilever better for the future. The acquisitions included many founder-led, purpose-driven businesses, extending some categories and venturing into new ones.

Sundial Brands was a successful hair and skin care company that served a younger, multicultural consumer base. The founder, Rich Dennis, emigrated from Liberia and started the business with nothing, selling shea butter from a folding card table on the streets of Harlem in New York City.⁸ Dennis stayed on after the acquisition. He and his company bring additional diversity and knowledge of new, growing markets to Unilever.

Many of these entrepreneurial CEOs expressed clearly that they were only interested in joining Unilever. Mark Ramadan and Scott Norton, the founders of natural condiments company Sir Kensington, said that “our company was not for sale.” But when Unilever approached them, they realized that joining the company would “allow us to more rapidly expand distribution while holding true to our values.”⁹

Jeffrey Hollender, as cofounder of the purpose-led company Seventh Generation, had always been suspicious of big companies. For many years, he refused to sell his products at Walmart. Hollender says, even more bluntly than Ramadan and Norton, “There weren’t multiple companies to buy Seventh Generation that wouldn’t give me a lump in my throat … there was one option.”¹⁰ John Replogle, the CEO of Seventh Generation at the time, says they were not for sale. When approached, they embarked on six months of conversations with Unilever leadership about being a B Corp and their values. Only then did they talk about purchase price.¹¹ In the five years since Seventh Generation was acquired, sales more than doubled and its products are now sold in forty countries, many more than they had been in before.

Unilever has generally allowed acquisitions to operate independently of the mother ship, but draw on the knowledge and resources they need to scale up. Kees Kruythoff, former president of Unilever North America, says the company wanted to serve these newly acquired businesses and help them grow. He told Seventh Generation leadership, “Congrats, you just bought Unilever—our resources are at your disposal.” Kruythoff also told Jostein Solheim, CEO of the activist Ben & Jerry’s brand, “Your job is to be the insurgent in Unilever.”¹²

Founders generally leave the big companies that buy them, but most of these CEOs stayed with Unilever because of the culture. These entrepreneurs feel more affinity with each other than with a typical Unilever brand team. As more stay, they attract others; it’s a multiplier effect of competitive advantage.

A net positive company looks at M&A differently, with a higher success rate for adding new companies into the culture and learning from them as well. Bringing in successful, purpose-led businesses and founders—with their pioneering, risk-taking mindset—adds something new to Unilever’s DNA. Executives see the passion and excitement, and it rubs off. They hear a different language that big companies don’t speak anymore.

The more purpose-led organizations Unilever envelops—ones that have clear missions to serve stakeholders—the faster the organization’s purpose flywheel spins, and the closer it gets to net positive.

The Development of Purpose-Driven Brands

Marc Mathieu, the global head of marketing in the early days of the USLP, played a critical role in driving purpose down to the brand level. He’s a respected thinker on what brands mean, and he knew Unilever needed to change how it thought about itself before it could convince consumers of anything. To help the organization evolve, build a different culture, and develop brands that deliver on the USLP, he created a narrative he called Crafting Brands for Life. It was an internal marketing campaign with videos asking everyone, “Are you willing to change the world again?” (referring to Lord Lever’s commitment to hygiene at Unilever’s founding).

A brand is a product to buy, of course, but also an idea to buy into, Mathieu says. The idea needs to be bigger than the product to add value. To expand thinking, Mathieu redesigned Unilever’s “brand key,” one of the core tools the company’s marketers use to shape brand positioning. The original chart had fourteen boxes and was overly complicated. Mathieu reduced it to a triangle with a focus on product, brand, and human truths. To drive toward purpose, he added a heart with a larger ambition, and some additional elements to bring it to life.

Unilever calls this the brand love key (see figure 9-1). We show here a version for Rexona, an Australian antiperspirant brand (known as Sure, Degree, or Shield in other countries). The brand’s purpose is to help people live a better life, “do more,” and push their limits, with confidence and no odor. Rexona’s USLP ambition is to “enable doers to live a more physically active, socially connected, and emotionally engaged life.” Rexona supports personal hygiene education programs as part of its work.

You’d be forgiven for saying, “Oh, come on, it’s deodorant.” Fair enough. This is not one of the most world-changing brand missions, but that makes it a good example of the challenge. A purpose-driven brand connects to and helps solve a larger problem in the world or in people’s lives. Deodorant ties to self-image and comfort in social engagements, which matters to people. Sure, some brands connect to bigger goals. Lifebuoy can literally save lives through hand washing. Vaseline provides medical supplies to sites of natural disasters and refugee camps. Domestos cleaning products can credibly have a purpose to “win the war on poor sanitation.”

FIGURE 9-1

Brand love key

Sample Unilever Brand Love Key, Rexona

But Rexona deodorant? Or, more to the point, Axe body spray?! How can a brand that lived off misogynistic advertising images for years find a good purpose? Yet somehow it did, flipping the messaging to question toxic masculinity and support multiple meanings of manhood. Norms often change, or in some cases, they need to. Axe had to show humility and acknowledge how it had portrayed women. Finding a larger mission for some brands, like Axe, has not been easy or obvious. It takes time. The ones that have figured it out have a mission that is clear to everyone internally and to their consumers. They’ve found a purpose that fits the history and functional benefits of the product.

Many of Unilever’s brands have used the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a tool to find their larger mission. Knorr food, with supply chains in agriculture, is working on SDG 3 (good health & well-being) and SDG 15 (life on land). Domestos is fighting a war on poor hygiene, which ties to SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation).

The process of finding a purpose that works for a brand is an evolution. Karen Hamilton, Unilever’s global VP of sustainability, groups the brands on a purpose journey into three buckets: crafting the purpose and building the brand key; learning (with humility) more about an issue and working with partners to build programs; and, for the most advanced brands, such as Dove, Lifebuoy, Domestos, and Seventh Generation, scaling their initiatives. The further along the path a brand is, the more it closes the “say/do” gap, clearly stating what it stands for and creating programs that deliver real impact.

The “do” part, the action on the ground and programs that improve lives, is what gives them credibility to keep raising the bar and address bigger and deeper issues. Dove can legitimately talk about self-esteem because it has held classes for sixty-nine million young people. Lifebuoy can engage on improving child mortality rates because it has taught hundreds of millions of people about hand washing with soap. Domestos can work on the larger issue of open defecation because it helped build millions of toilets in India and developed many school cleaning programs. Brooke Bond Red Label tea can work on racial and gender bias after using its ads and marketing to take the issue head on.

Brands with purpose create a virtuous circle that leads to more purpose work and more net positive outcomes.

Revitalizing Brands

Moving perceptions and financial results for a big, mature brand is hard. None of Unilever’s products is more mature than Lifebuoy soap. Its journey from the 1800s is a microcosm of the Unilever story. It combines history and real progress for society with business growth. Finding a brand purpose can revitalize stagnant brands and reanimate the culture, as long as there’s a good, authentic story and real action.

The challenge Lifebuoy has long focused on is the heartbreaking death of millions of children before age five from preventable diseases.¹⁴ Regular hand washing can reduce the incidence of two big killers, pneumonia and diarrhea, by 23 and 45 percent, respectively. Teaching new mothers and midwives better hand-washing behavior can prevent 40 percent of the 2.5 million deaths that happen within the first month of life.

Lifebuoy’s program has centered on a few actions: events to train kids and mothers on hygiene; extensive outreach through media; a comic book, School of Five, that promotes hand washing at five key times (after toilet, before each meal, and during bathing); and product innovations, such as a Mickey Mouse dispenser, to help make hand washing commonplace and fun.

Since 2010, the program has reached about half a billion people—a large part of the 1.3 billion people Unilever reached through all its hygiene and health programs—in twenty-nine countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Unilever built partnerships around the programs, including a collaboration with the Global Vaccine Alliance in India to promote both washing with soap and immunization, two of the most cost-effective solutions for avoiding disease. A newer £100 million partnership with the UK government worked specifically on reaching one billion people to raise awareness and change behavior to fight Covid-19.¹⁵

The results of the full program, as part of the world’s efforts to reduce unnecessary deaths, have been outstanding. Globally, 36 percent fewer children die from diarrhea. A study of two thousand families in India showed that those who went through a Lifebuoy training program reduced cases of diarrhea by 25 percent, acute respiratory infections by 15 percent, and eye infections (from touching eyes with dirty hands) by 46 percent. New mothers who are educated are dramatically more likely to wash their hands after changing diapers and before breastfeeding.

The financial resuscitation of the Lifebuoy brand has been remarkable. Revenues were flat or slightly declining for decades. As it leaned into purpose, Lifebuoy sales started growing a double-digit percentage per year. It became the twelfth product to join the pantheon of Unilever’s €1 billion brands. When he left Unilever, Lifebuoy gave Paul a custom-made package of soap picturing Paul and his wife, Kim, on the cover (not a gold watch, but nice). The packaging brags that Lifebuoy had achieved the core USLP goal of reducing footprint while doubling sales.

Many of Unilever’s purpose-driven brands have started growing again after years of going nowhere. The Knorr brand of soup and meal mixes adopted a purpose of making “wholesome, nutritious food accessible and affordable to all,” and worked on issues of food quality, access, and health. After decades of flat sales, it is doing well in tough markets, even as competitor sales drop. Hellmann’s mayonnaise, a 125-year-old brand, found new energy after Unilever figured out that the brand could play a big role in the fight against food waste. The leadership team visited farms and began connecting the brand to its roots, with ads featuring farmers who supply the eggs. Hellmann’s worked to “defend real food” through its sourcing and messaging. With these efforts, and walking the talk with 100 percent cage-free eggs and 100 percent recycled plastic packaging, Hellmann’s started growing again.

These successes do amazing things for the culture at Unilever. More than forty thousand employees have participated in hand-washing events as Lifesaver volunteers. Everyone can feel pride that the company has helped save millions of lives. They know their employer stands for something and that they can take part. They also see the business succeed financially, which increases buy-in and convinces even the skeptics that net positive work is good business … and that they should do more of it.

Home-Grown Purpose

Net positive thinking drives innovation and inspires companies to do more than just revitalize existing brands. Kees Kruythoff says that the portfolio of purpose-driven products comes together from three areas of work: strengthening core products such as Dove and Ben & Jerry’s, acquiring brands like Seventh Generation and Shea Moisture, and crafting new products from the ground up. This last one may be the most fun.

The company started with a blank sheet of paper when it developed Love Beauty and Planet hair and skin care. The packaging is 100 percent recycled content. Ingredients are vegan and cruelty-free, with no parabens or dyes. Everything is sourced to reduce impact and promote livelihoods. Vetiver plants, which provide oil with a woody scent, come from Haitian farms. Unilever pays a premium for the oil and supports community development projects, such as roads, better access to health care, sanitation, and electricity.

As Kruythoff says, “The freedom to start from scratch, without any legacy, and design from societal needs back into formulation, packaging, and communication—that’s the ultimate in crafting brands for life!” The clean slate also gave them flexibility on where the brand could go, leading to extensions such as Love Home and Planet cleaning products. The Love Beauty and Planet line made $50 million in its first year. Global shampoo and conditioner sales were down, but the new product grew fast, climbing into the top 20 shampoo brands in its launch year.¹⁶ After just two years, it was on the shelves in forty countries.

The whole new line of products was created by a half dozen people in a room asking what a from-the-ground-up, purpose-driven brand could look like. They were given the space to think big. Similarly, a single, passionate employee, Laura Fruitman, created The Right to Shower, which makes soaps and body washes with names such as “Hope” and “Dignity.” Thirty percent of profits go to initiatives that help homeless people get access to services, including showers. Fruitman was a global brand manager at Dove when she made the pitch based on her personal purpose to help the homeless. She found a perfect way to live that mission within Unilever. Now she’s the product general manager and an “entrepreneur in residence” at the company.

It’s a good example of what can come from a culture of compassion, service, growth, and creativity.

Challenging the Norms around You

Executives often fear that if they put their values out there, they will step in hot water. Things get tricky if the culture of the business—diversity and tolerance, for example—clashes with the cultural norms in the society around the business.

Brooke Bond is one of the largest tea brands in the world, with a huge presence in India. The company has made a mission of “standing for inclusion in a world of prejudice.” It uses its marketing machine to run campaigns about tolerance, showing how sitting down to tea can help people come together. In India, religious violence against Muslims has been tragically common. This is, to put it mildly, a contentious situation. Yet, Brooke Bond dove into the issue. One ad shows an Indian family, presumably Hindu, locked out of their apartment. A Muslim woman next door invites them in for tea. They are hesitant, but go in and share a cup. The tagline is the “taste of togetherness.”

Another Brooke Bond campaign takes on discrimination against transgender people. A grandmother and child are stuck in a cab in bad traffic in the rain. A transgender tea vendor knocks on the window and the old woman waves her away and mutters in a disgusted voice, “those transgenders.” But the vendor is offering free tea for people stuck in the traffic. The woman takes it, loves it, and calls the vendor back over. She gently touches the tea vendor’s face and says “bless you” while the little girl watches and learns tolerance. Hindustan Unilever’s inclusion work is broad; it helped support the creation of India’s first transgender band. A film about the group won a Grand Prix prize at the Cannes film festival.

These ads can sound like gimmicks, but they feel genuine and are effective. Brooke Bond recently became the largest tea brand in India. Hindustan Unilever chairman Sanjiv Mehta says that he can’t say it’s because of the transgender or religious tolerance work, but the success is about having “brands with purpose at heart, which is not just brand say but brand do.”¹⁷

Taking a stand has risks. A Unilever ice cream brand ran a campaign in Australia in support of gay rights. The product was made in Indonesia, and some was sold in that market. When the Australian ads were posted online, anyone could see them … including people in Indonesia, where being gay is illegal. Unilever eventually removed the ads, but it did not back down from inclusion in its business. The company, in its hiring and benefits, recognizes gay marriage globally. In Indonesia, it’s clear to the gay community which companies are welcoming, and those organizations get access to more talent.

Still, it’s a tightrope to walk, and a company must maintain its principles, while being careful about messaging that may offend different cultures. A net positive business will be an advocate for change and is willing to face tougher challenges, especially if it can lead a group to take on cultural norms together. In Uganda, being gay used to carry the death penalty. The B Team, a group of global leaders advocating for more human-centered business practices, wrote a letter to the Ugandan government threatening a boycott. It was not the only factor, but it helped, and the law changed.

A cultural commitment to equity runs across Unilever. Domestos, in its sanitation and hygiene work, took on India’s caste system in a clever way. As the brand helped get millions of public toilets built, there was an issue with maintenance. In India, it was taboo for anyone but untouchables to clean a toilet. To encourage everyone to take part in community hygiene and well-being, Domestos created a new campaign, Pick up the Brush. The ads show A-list Indian stars cleaning their toilets.

Caste is a difficult stereotype to break, but gender stereotypes may be even harder. Unilever’s former chief marketing and communications officer, Keith Weed, says that the majority of advertising has been stuck in a dated, 1950s worldview, where Dad can’t operate a washing machine and Mom is always in the kitchen. In a global survey, 40 percent of women said they did not see themselves in most advertising—only 4 percent of ads showed women in leadership positions.¹⁸

To battle this twisted view of reality, Unilever cofounded the Unstereotype Alliance with UN Women, major ad agencies like IPG and WPP, and big ad buyers, such as Google, Mars, Microsoft, and J&J. With the UN as a convener, they got rival P&G on board (for context, Unilever and P&G are the two biggest advertisers in the world). The alliance hopes to “banish stereotypical portrayals of gender in advertising.”¹⁹ It’s a powerful idea: ensure that hundreds of billions of ad dollars support equality.

The initiative has tested and measured the effectiveness of more inclusive communications. Ads that represent people well generate 25 percent more engagement and purchase intent.²⁰ The Unstereotype Alliance is challenging norms and a cultural system that keeps people in little boxes. Unilever has also worked on messaging about inclusiveness for the disabled in countries as diverse as Mexico and Egypt. In 2021, Unilever also committed to a global ban on the word “normal” in advertising or on packaging, as part of its Positive Beauty work.²¹ As these initiatives and commitments grow, they help shift the culture in society and inside companies to be more inclusive, respectful, and equitable.

That’s an inspiring net positive outcome.

Moments of Net Positive Courage

The website BabyNames does exactly what it sounds like; it offers expectant parents data on the frequency of names and their meanings. It’s not a controversial company. But after the murder of African American George Floyd by police, BabyNames created one of the most powerful messages of support for Black Lives Matter. The site put a simple black box on its home page, listing dozens of Black Americans killed by racism and hatred, going back to the 1960s. The top of the box said simply, “Each one of these names was somebody’s baby.”

Companies generally avoid calling attention to themselves on contentious issues. But that’s a mistake. Standing for something matters to stakeholders, especially employees. Like Dick’s Sporting Goods (chapter 2), Levi’s decided to use its brand reach to speak out on gun violence in America. The company partnered with a gun safety NGO to form a coalition of business leaders committed to action. They encouraged employees to use their five hours a month of paid volunteer time to get politically active. CEO Chip Bergh, a sustainability leader, said “We simply cannot stand by silently when it comes to issues that threaten the very fabric of the communities where we live and work … taking a stand can be unpopular with some, but doing nothing is no longer an option.”²²

Businesses in the services sector—consultants, banks, PR and ad firms, and so on—face tests of courage every time they choose to work with troubling clients. Pursuing customers to generate revenue at any cost is not a good choice. These situations make for tough decisions, and some companies seem to be consistently making the wrong ones.

Consulting giant McKinsey keeps finding itself on the losing end of moral choices (a New York Times headline, “How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments,” is a good example).²³ The company was fined $559 million because of “advice” it gave Purdue Pharma on how to increase sales of OxyContin, the prescription opioid.²⁴ McKinsey calculated that the company could afford to pay “rebates” to pharmacies for every patient who overdosed. The strategy guru and former McKinsey consultant, Tom Peters, wrote an open letter in the Financial Times effectively renouncing his association with the firm, asking, “Should I remove McKinsey from my CV?”²⁵ When you lose one of your most famous alums, it’s not good.

The math on the number of pills sold per person was clear to many companies in the opioid value chain (including J&J, which also got fined). A consulting firm acting as a real partner to these companies, serving their best interests and the interests of society, would have helped them rethink their stance on opioids … or walked away. McKinsey helped Purdue go down an immoral path that was potentially devastating for the brand and its long-term financial performance.

Unilever has faced many situations that force a choice between doing the right thing versus immediate business results. When a courier service in London did not pay its delivery people minimum wages, Unilever stopped using the company to deliver ice cream. In another case, facing demands for bribes in Kenya, it stopped shipments from leaving the country. Choices like these set a moral standard that works better for the business in the long run because it gets reflected in the whole organization. Your people watch closely the way you do business.