‘Big brands can become suspicious,’ Unilever’s CEO says, as FMCG firm taps 300,000 influencers

For decades, Unilever perfected the art of scale: big brands, big budgets and broadcast messages designed to travel the world intact. Now, under Fernando Fernandez, the company is betting that scale alone is no longer enough, and that trust, increasingly, must be borrowed rather than declared.

At a fireside chat with Celine Pannuti, head of consumer staples at JPMorgan, Fernandez described what he called a “real revolution” in the way Unilever markets its products, one that moves decisively away from traditional top-down advertising and toward what he sees as a more fragmented, credibility-driven model.

“I believe that broadcasting messages from big brands now can become suspicious,” Fernandez said.

The alternative, he argued, lies in what Unilever calls “said by others”-recommendations delivered not by corporations but by people. When Fernandez took over, he made a point of publicly committing to an aggressive expansion of the company’s influencer ecosystem. Today, that network has reached a scale few global companies can match: nearly 170,000 influencers in the Beauty and Wellbeing division alone, and close to 300,000 across the group.

The shift reflects a broader change in consumer behavior. Fernandez likened brand discovery to choosing a restaurant: increasingly guided by ratings, reviews and peer validation rather than advertising claims. In that environment, he said, brands must build infrastructure that enables third-party advocacy at scale—not simply buy attention.

Yet Fernandez was notably unsentimental about the company’s progress so far. He rated Unilever’s current marketing execution at “a six or six and a half,” well short of the eight or nine he wants the company to reach. The ambition, he said, is not incremental improvement but a step change—one that touches everything from product development to how brands are validated in the market.

“This is just where I spend,” he said, referring to the disproportionate share of his time devoted to people. About 20 percent of his focus, Fernandez said, is on talent, reflecting a belief that culture and capability, not just capital, will determine whether the strategy succeeds.

That philosophy extends to spending. Fernandez rejected the idea of pulling back investment in uncertain times, offering a blunt formulation more common in industrial than consumer circles: “Being consciously uncompetitive equates to negligence.”

The results, he suggested, are beginning to show. Unilever’s volume growth has accelerated through the year, reaching 1.7 percent in the third quarter, with the company expecting a similar performance in the fourth. Competitiveness, Fernandez said, is improving—an assertion that investors have been pressing consumer goods companies to substantiate amid uneven global demand.

Underlying the changes is a broader cultural push. The pace of transformation under Fernandez, he said, has been defined by doing things differently--placing renewed emphasis on talent, elevating standards across geographies and categories, and refusing to accept legacy ways of working as inevitable.