Marketing Update
Using Purpose Driven Brands to Create a Brighter Future for all South Africans –
Peter Cowan, CEO of Unilever South Africa
Environmental Water Quality, Wildlands,
UNICEF and Thokomala for our children.
Peter Cowan, president and CEO
of Unilever South Africa, has filled
These initiatives are sustained through
a Company with Purpose, Brands with
Purpose, and Leaders with Purpose.
But this does not happen overnight,
Cowan advises. He says that you have
to be authentic, and you have to stay
true to your purpose, and with time this
becomes imprinted in your DNA. Stay
on the path and over the long term the
company gets both benefits and results.
various executive roles across
the globe, including a stint as
head of the New Zealand Dairy
Board, he sheepishly admits.
Cowan’s presentation revolved
around combining business with
a social purpose:
Unilever leverages its 47 brands in
achieving its global vision of “Doubling
the size of our business, whilst reducing
our environmental footprint and
increasing our positive social impact”.
In South Africa, Unilever’s 2020 vision
is to be “a leading company helping
to create a bright future for all South
Africans”. Unilever has identified
three core business strategies around
He also sees a bigger picture,
this vision: Improving Health and WellBeing via health and hygiene initiatives;
Reducing Environmental Impacts via
education on greenhouse gases, water
and waste; and Enhancing Livelihoods via
promoting sustainable sourcing and better
livelihoods. Unilever uses Foundation
Partners in achieving these goals,
including their own Unilever Centre for
and says that the formula
for South Africa is simple:
More companies + more
government + more non-profit
organisation + more consumers
= sustained business +
sustainable living.
Companies in Motion: Value Driven Innovation and Change – Professor Andy Andrews,
Business School Guru
Professor Andy Andrews, with an
competitive benchmarking and imitation”.
impressive track record in both
He describes red oceans as all the
industries that we can describe today
operating in the known market space.
Industries are known and accepted, and
the competitive rules of the game are
known to all players. Here the strategies
of companies converge as they struggle to
outperform their rivals and gain a greater
share of the defined industry, product or
service demand. Sound familiar, guys? In
contrast, Kim describes blue oceans as
all the industries not in existence today
and not yet created – the unknown market
space, untainted by competition. In blue
oceans, new customer demand has to
be created. By redefining the market,
dramatic opportunities for growth that
is both profitable and rapid becomes
possible. When a blue ocean is created
competition is made irrelevant because
new “rules of the game” are being set!
business and academia, took the
delegates through an entrancing
journey of discovery around
the latest business school
fad, known as Blue Ocean
Strategy:
Blue Ocean Strategy is all about
creating new market space, in a fast
moving market. Andrews says that
companies have to be like Formula One
cars, in that after very race tweaks and
improvements have to be made. To
buttress this argument, he cites some
scary statistics of companies that do not
heed this dynamic. During the 1990’s
46% (230) companies disappeared
from the Fortune 500. And of the 1980
Fortune 500, only 16 remain. South
Africa, in a more cosseted environment,
did not fare much better, with only nine
of the top 100 companies in 1920,
remaining in the top 100 in 1995.
What do the companies that have
survived have in common? They all
reconstructed their industries or reinvented their industries – through a
process of innovation led change. W.
Chan Kim, the man who penned the term
Blue Ocean Strategies, says that “in blue
oceans, demand is created rather than
fought over. There is ample opportunity