CreativeX’s technology empowered Unilever homecare brands to understand & maximize the impact of unique brand guidelines that have proven to catalyze sales.
"Branding and communications are entirely visual semiotics. The explosion of content is overwhelming. However, CreativeX has the capabilities and tools to sift and cut through all that and provide some really valuable insights. I think there’s a huge opportunity in this space.” —Reshmi Ouseph, Manager, Centre of Excellence, Unilever
With so many channels, markets, and teams, manually tracking the consistency of creative content is virtually impossible. At the same time, consistency is paramount to consumers—60% of whom say it plays a major role in closing sales. To quantify the creative consistency of its brands, Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, partnered with CreativeX to track adoption of distinctive brand guidelines for homecare brands Persil, OMO, and Surf Excel. The Consumer & Market Intelligence team at Unilever adopted CreativeX to efficiently track their images, videos, and gifs for their key branding elements across both on and off-line consumer touchpoints.
Before CreativeX, Unilever collaborated with the Ehrenberg Bass Institute of Marketing Science to identify Distinctive Brand Assets unique to OMO, Persil, and Surf Excel, such as the ‘SPLAT’ mark and “Dirt is good” taglines. After transforming these “mental shortcuts” into brand guidelines, Unilever realized they needed a robust way to track, implement, and enforce these learnings.
Ensuring aesthetic and brand consistency that increases consumer top of mind awareness was a priority goal for Unilever’s brand leadership teams due to their direct impact on consumer recall and ultimately sales.
“We’ve invested significant resources into building our brands’ distinctive assets but advertising in 2019 is completely different than it was 4-5 years ago and with the explosion of content and media channels, we didn’t know how much we were capitalizing on our distinctive assets or how frequently, prominently, and entrenched those assets were in our communications. We know that a lack of consistency in our style and visual tone will erode mental availability and give our competitors an opening to become top of mind. As most consumers don’t have time to think about laundry and instead make decisions on auto-pilot, enforcing consistency in our creative assets is critical for forging mental shortcuts and improving the effectiveness of our communication.” —Reshmi Ouseph
With so many platforms, teams, and stakeholders, OMO, Persil, and Surf Excel saw immediate benefits in leveraging CreativeX as the solution to monitor brand consistency at scale across all their channels and markets. In a matter of days, CreativeX integrated each of the three brand’s guidelines into the Creative Multipliers tool, custom-building an artificially- intelligent model to autonomously monitor their content’s consistency.
“We used CreativeX to help us identify how our distinctive guidelines were being used, both across markets and across channels. The tool was able to visually identify what these distinctive assets were in advance and then track whether these were being used in market and how often.” —Reshmi Ouseph
Creative assets spanning the last two years across digital, out-of-home, TV, and print channels in their UK, Indian, and Brazilian markets were ingested into CreativeX. Within a matter of hours, the system analyzed all the assets and measured each creative’s consistency and brand guideline adoption.
This historical analysis divulged an important revelation: distinctive brand guidelines were not being maximized. CreativeX allowed the Consumer & Market Intelligence team to easily review the results, uncover unique strategic insights, and answer some important questions. For example, which assets met brand guidelines? Which channels and teams were communicating their brand in the most consistent way? Were brand stories being differently told on-line vs. off-line? Which teams best leveraged brand guidelines? Pinpointing such insights allowed OMO, Persil, and Surf Excel to regain control of their content and develop a plan for maximizing their Distinctive Brand Assets.
“CreativeX’s technology has reinforced that we need to be consistent and really proved that we aren’t using our distinctive assets enough. We could be a lot more consistent in terms of what we were exposing our consumers to and how we were communicating our brand stories across both digital and off-line channels. It became clear that the visuals consumers were exposed to over the last couple of years were actually quite varied and inconsistent.” —Reshmi Ouseph
By auditing their creatives through CreativeX, Unilever’s key homecare brands not only quantified their brand guideline adoption and consistency, but also used this data as a foundation to align the creative strategy across platforms and markets and to guide future content strategy for OMO, Persil, and Surf Excel.
To ensure that all teams are marching to the beat of the same drum, Unilever has adopted CreativeX technology to both measure the impact of consistency on digital performance metrics and pre-test all of their assets for brand guideline and best practice adoption prior to publication. This ultimately enables Unilever’s brands to optimize media spend, safeguard their branding, and maintain brand consistency worldwide.
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