Unilever’s Fernando Fernandez made waves in his first public interview as CEO last month when he shared his plans to ‘work with 20 times more influencers’. In his first quarterly earnings call as CEO today, he reiterated this goal.
The FMCG company recorded underlying sales growth (USG) of 3%. Fernadez called this performance ‘resilient’ and added that, although ‘heightened global macroeconomic uncertainty is a fact’, Unilever has confidence that it will meet its full-year plans, expecting USG to be between 3-5%.
Fernandez went on to share that Unilever’s medium- and long-term focus will be on ‘building desirability at scale’ and creating ‘new models of reach and persuasion’ for its brands.
‘I have mentioned the need of really covering every zip code with influencers and other people talking about our brand,’ he said. ‘In the last few weeks, I have spent a lot of time with my top marketeers defining what we call the 4V model of social media: variety of creators, volume, virality, and velocity of content.’
Fernandez said that focusing on influencer marketing will take Unilever to the next stage of its transformation, by ‘creating a machine of demand creation both in marketing and sales.’
And Unilever was not the only company to sing the praises of creator marketing today.
ASOS held its H1 earnings call shortly after Unilever and reported strong performance over the last six months, with adjusted ebitda up by £60m, year on year.
CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte said that ASOS had achieved this by reducing discounts and cutting investments in performance marketing. He also said, ‘We have increased the influencer network that we work with, and we have increased that by 30% during the last six months, and that is having an impact. We are improving our ROAS [return on ad spend], but we are also improving the reactivation of consumers.’
Featured image: Unilever products / Unilever media centre