Published June 17
Unilever’s Wellbeing Collective has an interesting proposition: Operate six individual companies — Liquid I.V., Olly, Nutrafol, SmartyPants Vitamins, Onnit, Welly and Equilibra — under the Unilever umbrella.
That separation gives the Wellbeing Collective the flexed power of a startup mentality with corporate muscle, according to Amanda Faibis, its head of media. Faibis shared with The Current’s Lee Singletary how Unilever is innovating on measurement and capturing cultural moment with Liquid I.V.’s placement on the series The Summer I Turned Pretty.
You oversee a huge portfolio and media for the Wellbeing Collective at Unilever. How do you define the mission of that portfolio, and what makes marketing wellbeing brands different from other consumer packaged goods?
I’d say first, from a starting point, the Wellbeing Collective is an acquired business group. All of the at least the six operating companies I oversee in the U.S. were bought by Unilever over the last several years, so they were all founder led.
And so, what that means for our group is we try to keep the autonomy of each operating company, but then also we have the backing and the power to take advantage of all the things that come from a holding company that Unilever offers.
How do you think about measurement today in the context of the Wellbeing Collective?
Creative and measurement are big things we want to improve on, but we have strong foundation so far. From a measurement standpoint, we have historically relied on MMM (media mix modeling). We have a partner that’s worked with us for several years. But I think this year for us is what’s the next level of that.
Can you share an example of a campaign or a specific moment that really exceeded expectations, especially from a measurement end?
One thing that comes to mind is last summer. Liquid I.V. was a sponsor of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
That was a huge cultural moment with the new season coming out last summer, and it exceeded expectations. How do you combine a cultural moment with authentically mirroring a brand into that? And Liquid I.V. has done that so well, so many times.
How do you think about staying emotionally resonate and relevant with the campaigns that you run across Olly, Nutrafol and Liquid I.V.?
Those are three power brands that we say in our portfolio, that diverse portfolio they each have their own target audience and consumers that they are going for. Their strategies are all different. But the advantage of being in the Wellbeing Collective is that we all come together as a group, and we share learnings. We can test with one operating company. If it works, then go and scale with another. And that’s what we’re going to do with measurement trial, a few different partners or a few different ways of evaluating.
And if it works, we’re going to go roll it out with the rest of the division. And that’s one unique power overall of the Wellbeing Collective that we have together. The collaboration, the startup mentality, we are these companies individually but then come together collectively.
