introduction unilever

Itsproducts include food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal careproducts.Unilever owns over 400 brands, but focuses on 14 brands with sales ofover 1 billion euros.co-Unilever is mu

1 Introduction

a Overview

Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational consumer goods company co-headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and London, United Kingdom Its products include food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products.Unilever owns over 400 brands, but focuses on 14 brands with sales of over 1 billion euros

Unilever is multinational with operating companies and factories on every continent except Antarctica and research laboratories in: Colworth and Port Sunlight, England; Vlaardingen, Netherlands; Connecticut and New Jersey, United States; Bangalore, India; and Shanghai, China It has subsidiaries in almost 100 countries Notable Unilever subsidiaries include Hindustan Unilever, in which Unilever holds a 67% controlling share

Vision

Unilever has a simple but clear purpose – to make sustainable living commonplace

‘’We believe this is the best long-term way for our business to grow’’

They have built a strategy to help us achieve their purpose of making sustainable living commonplace.Vision: “Unilever’s vision is to work to create a better future every day We help people feel good, look and get more out of their life with brands and services that are good for them and good for others We will inspire people to take small everyday actions that can add up to a big difference for the world We will develop new ways of doing business that will allow us to double the size of our company while reducing our environmental impact.”

 Accelerating growth

 Reducing environmental footprint

 Increasing positive social impact

They have the vision of accelerating growth in the business, while reducing our environmental footprint and increasing their positive social impact

Strategy

Improving Health & Well-being

 Health & hygiene

 Improving nutrition

Reducing Environmental Impact

 Greenhouse gases

 Water use

 Waste & packaging

 Sustainable sourcing

Enhancing Livelihoods & Well-being

 Fairness in the workplace

 Opportunities for women

 Inclusive business

Their strategic focus

To realise vision they have invested in a long-term strategy of categories and brands that deliver growth to the benefit of all stakeholders

b Products:

Unilever's products include foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products The company owns more than 400 brands, which are organised into four main categories - Foods, Refreshments, Home Care, and Personal Care

The 14 most focused brands are Axe/Lynx (Men's grooming products), Dove (Personal care), Omo (laundry detergent), Becel/Flora (Margarine), Heartbrand (ice creams), Hellmann's (mayonnaise), Knorr (food), Lipton (drinks) , Lux (soap), Magnum (ice cream), Rama (food), Rexona (Deodorant/antiperspirant) and Sunsilk (hair products) and Surf ( laundry products)

Unilever is organised into four main divisions: Personal Care (production and sale

of skin care and hair care products, deodorants and oral care products); Foods (production and sale of soups, bouillons, sauces, snacks, mayonnaise, salad dressings, margarines and spreads); Refreshment (production and sale of ice cream, tea-based beverages, weight-management products and nutritionally enhanced staples sold in developing markets); and Home Care (production and sale of home care products including powders, liquids and capsules, soap bars and other cleaning products)

2 Microenvironment of Unilever:

Microenvironment includes: company, competitors, customers, suppliers, market intermediaries, publics

1 Company:

Value chain:

Primary activities:

Inbound logistics:

 Unilever works with the agriculture industry to get the raw materials

 Raw materials enter the manufacturing site

Production and Operation:

 Raw materials are processed to add more value

 End products are packaged Ready to be shipped

Outbound logistics:

 Product are shipped to distributors

Marketing and Sale:

 The product is promoted though different media such as television, social media, magazine, etc

Service:

 They are collecting complaints from customers or distributors

Support activities

Procurement:

 Unilever works with the agriculture industry to get materials

Technology development:

 They spent a lot of capital on R&D to reduce environmental impact Human resources development:

 Because they are in manufacturing industry, they relu on machine and their employees That’s why they have so many employees and take care of their employees

Firm infrastructure:

 The good management of Unilever planning and financing also add values for their customers and stakeholders

International Strategy

Unilever was once a typical MNC, but now it has transferred to operate with multinational strategies

With the development of interweaved economy, Unilever began to modify its management strategies since 1990s, concentrating on its advantageous products and brands At the same time, Unilever pays great attention to combining globalization with localization It will develop its new products' ingredients, formulas and even advertisement and package according to the diversified habit and expectations of consumers in different regions

Unilever owns more 400 brands around the world but most of them is first purchased from other nations and then popularized to the whole world

Unilever takes the brand strategy as its core competitiveness Unilever has a rich, mature, multi-brand management experience for a global perspective, it focuses on brand strategy, decreases the number of brands from 2000 to 400, so as to ensure

the first-line brand growth As for localization, Unilever has meanwhile sought in the development of global brands, as well as protection and development of domestic brands

The key point for the success of Unilever

Mainly consists of two part:

 Promoting brand value

 Establishing Competency Model

2 Suppliers:

Among Unilever's 400 global brands, most of them is purchased from original countries first and then popularized to the whole world Unilever's success greatly depends on its deep root in local market and the first-hand data of regional culture The company will change dynamically to adapt to the local conditions Global and native brands develop together so that the company will gain maximum benefit

We source more than 200,000 different materials from 160,000 suppliers who work with up to a million smallholder farmers

We run more than 250 factories which produce 130,000 tea bags every minute, 1 billion deodorants annually and 2 billion Magnums every year

Unilever requires all suppliers they do business with to register in the Global Unilever Supplier Qualification System (USQS)

As a multi-national company, Unilever’s Procurement team is purchasing from thousands of suppliers worldwide So they decided to introduce a USQS to manage the complexity of our supplier information USQS will enable us to standardise and streamline the way we engage with suppliers no matter where they are located It is

a single system that allows all suppliers to demonstrate to Unilever their

capabilities

USQS will help the Global Unilever Procurement Team to:

- Identify approved suppliers for the products and services they want to buy

- Better understand the potential risks of buying products or services in all geographies

- Encourage improvementns in supplier standards

SOME UNILEVER SUPPLIERS

1 Vietnam Chemical Corporation (Vinachem): supply to Unilever 100,000 tons / year (including 65,000 tons of washing powder, liquid detergent 35,000 tons)

2 Barry Callebaut is the world's leading supplier of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products

3 Symrise, one of the world’s largest vanilla suppliers

4 Cosmetic chemical factories Bicico is a leading outsourcing company Unilever VN International Ltd with well-known products such as Comfort, Sunlight, Vim

5 ALPLA and MuCell Extrusion - Unilever’s global packaging suppliers

3 Market intermediaries:

Unilever sales their products in over 100 countries all over the world They sell it

in all kind of stores, for example in Supermarkets, drugstores and small specialized shops To introduce their brand name to the world they use all kinds of organizations like World Food of the United Nations and the Olympic games Bud

if Unilever wants to promote their products, they don’t use the name Unilever bud just the specific brand name of the product So they can reach their customers more directly

4 Competitors:

Unilever's largest international competitors are Nestlé and Procter & Gamble (P&G) It also faces competition in local markets or specific product ranges from numerous companies,

including Beiersdorf ConAgra Danone Henkel Mars PepsiCo Reckitt , , , , , , Benckiser and SC Johnson & Son

For the competitors, P&G, undoubtedly, is Unilever's closest one There are fierce rivalries between two companies in many fields like hair product P&G has introduced Head-shoulders, REJOICE and PANTENE successively, known as professional anti-scurf, smooth hair and conditioning hair shampoos Thus, Unilever has launched a new brand "CLREAR" in order to cover its shortage in anti-handcuff market This has been not a small impact on P&G

Since 1996, Unilever has suffered great decline in turnover, while P&G still maintains a stable increase on the contrary In 2004, both Unilever and P&G gained a income of nearly $52 billion The later one's yearly profit reached as much as $6.4 billion, but Unilever only had $2.42 billion An indispensable reason

is just the purchasing strategy although it has pushed Unilever to success Beside, international rivals like Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive are not the greatest threat to Unilever, but instead the main competition comes from local brands in emerging markets "Regional players" in emerging markets have become the company's toughest competition For example, emerging markets will account

for 80% of the world's population and new leaders in India and Indonesia have demonstrated the need for structural reform, which he said would help to accelerate growth

Though, it’s remained that Unilever has long-term opportunities in these markets

5 Customers:

On any given day, 2 billion people use our products to look good, feel good and get more out of life Their portfolio ranges from nutritionally balanced foods to indulgent ice creams, affordable soaps, luxurious shampoos and everyday household care products The main target group are families who has to care about

a house and themselves of course Because lifestyles, tastes, and expectations are changing, also Unilever has to change, so they still can satisfy the customer needs They are doing this by doing researching to develop their existing products, and to search and create for new products

From long-established names such as Lipton, Knorr, Lifebuoy, Sunlight, and Pond's to new innovations such as the Pureit affordable water purifier, Unilever's range of brands is as diverse as its worldwide consumer base

Unilever used geographic method of market segmentation for the detergent OMO this product was specially designed for the Northeaster Brazilians and also the low-income earners in the area

6 Public:

Everybody on the earth can give their opinion about Unilever’s products to others, and that will make sense for the new consumers Because if they heard that the products of Unilever are having a bad quality they probably won’t buy them So Unilever had the idea to make a TV commercial to prevent that people won’t buy their products In this TV commercials they showed that customers are really satisfied about their products and that they will advocate to buy their products Also the media can tell the customers that the products are not trustable for example The influence of the media is always strong It’s actually a bit stupid that everybody believes what the media is saying, because the media just mastermind

something and tell is to the customers so they get attention and make money And the ones who they are talking about getting only worse of it

Companies must put their primary energy into effectively managing their relationships with their customers, distributors and suppliers Their overall success will be affected by how other publics in the society view their activity Companies would be wise to spend time monitoring all their public understanding their needs and opinions and dealing with then constructively

3 Micro factors affected the recent launch of Unilever’s products – Dove How has company dealt with these factors?

* Milestones:

1940’s: Fomula for Dove Bar

1950’s: Refined to original of Dove beauty Bar

1960’s: Launched ino the market

1980’s: Leading brand recommended by Physicians

1990’s: Dove beauty wash successfully launched

1995-2001: Extension of Dove’s range of products

Sept 2004: Global campaign product launch – ‘’Campaign for real beauty” => intented to make more women feel beautiful

"We want to challenge the definition of beauty We believe that beauty has become too narrow in definition We want to defy the stereotype that only the young, blond and tall are beautiful."1

- Philippe Harousseau, Dove's marketing director

1 Company

a Research and development

With the mission “ Make Vietnamese lives better’’, Unilever has given a wide range of high quality products with affordable prices ( example: )

It costs more than USD 300 million from Unilever to invest in VN market

(announced in 2013) And most products from Unilever including Dove shampoo are well known products to Vietnamese customers

b Manufacturing

Unilever has already had 5 factories in VN ( Hanoi, Cu Chi, Thu Duc in HCm city and Bien Hoa)

c Some challenging problem

Here's how greenhouse gas footprint across the value chain breaks down:

25 percent from raw materials,

4 percent from manufacturing,

2 percent from logistics,

68 percent from consumer use, and

1 percent at disposal of our products

Those are the impacts of our products across the lifecycle, from the sourcing of the raw materials to the way consumer using their products

They are also applying ‘circular value chain’ thinking to tackle some specific projects

Reuse: the use of refill pouches for dishwashing products, which we launched in South Africa in 2010, and have since been successfully rolled out in other countries too

Recycle: collect waste while some materials cannot readily be recycled, as technologies do not exist

However, they are working with Cempre in Brazil to help upskill and formalize community waste picker projects They also have successful projects

with RecycleBank in the U.S where they have been encouraging bathroom recycling and educating through our Dove and Suave brands They have achieved great success in encouraging aerosol recycling in Europe and in Brazil where they partner with customers to encourage collection In India, they have a partnership