Inspiring action

The founder of Unilever, Lord Lever, once said, “Nothing can be greater than a business governed by conscience.”

For over 120 years, this pioneering thinking has been at the heart of everything Unilever does and is still reflected in its purpose today: to make sustainable living commonplace.

The organization’s question for us: How could Unilever engage the younger generation to get involved?

Purchasing and using Unilever products has a positive impact by helping people achieve sustainable living. This was a key campaign message to communicate. A cross-functional youth strategy was launched, and a key pillar of this was Take Action.

We were asked to bring Take Action to life in the digital realm. The aim was to make it a tangible example of how Unilever makes the hope of a better world possible by inspiring the most influential players in social enterprise to collaborate. This helps youth turn their “ideas that do good” into a scalable and successful business.

At the forefront of everyone’s minds was a target audience that demands to be engaged instantly, meaning the user experience, tone and visual language had to be engaging and seamless with a mobile-first approach.

To address this, a research phase helped inform key decisions such as the most visually engaging way to display the initiatives. There was a delicate balancing act between the user feeling excited about the amount of choice versus feeling overwhelmed. This was considered throughout the design and build stages, with the user experience at the heart of every decision.

A Take Action hub was created that displays the content in an innovative and engaging way, unlocking opportunities for young social entrepreneurs and creating the inclusive capitalists of tomorrow.

In turn, this builds Unilever’s reputation among a powerful generation and future pipeline of consumers and employees. Most importantly, it makes this audience start to feel part of something, to feel empowered, to get involved and to take action.

The Take Action experience starts with a short quiz in which the user selects areas of personal interest. Logic was built into the hub, meaning a personal plan is created based on individual answers from the quiz. This is a first nod toward personalization, built upon in Phase 2.

From their personal plan, users can then access the main body of the hub, which displays all initiatives, not just their personal action plan. Infinite scroll technology was applied to the main section so users can scan and process the information much more quickly than traditional methods of surfacing content.

Our content strategy played a key part in the success of this project. Content is truly global and provides visitors with a purposeful action to take regardless of how much time they have, or where they are in the world.

The decision was taken that Take Action would be part of Unilever’s digital ecosystem and sit on Unilever.com. This meant the hub would benefit from the traffic volume that U.com receives — more than 20 million visits per year.

A linking strategy was implemented to capitalize on this, directing visitors to the Take Action hub from relevant content across the site. In addition, other channels (e.g., communications from HR) were used to drive traffic. The Careers section on Unilever.com is the second biggest driver to Take Action, demonstrating that the opportunity to take part in purpose-led initiatives appeals to this audience.

A wider distribution strategy included:

• A paid search campaign focusing on reach and awareness

• Weekly Instagram posts on the Unilever Global channel promoting one of the current initiatives on the hub

• LinkedIn posts and internal communications to Unilever employees

Take Action is delivering on its goals of making change happen, and the momentum continues to grow as more and more initiatives are added to the hub. It’s changing how the world does business.