On a website called netmums.com, a Derbyshire-based housewife seeks tips on washing jeans. "Does anyone out there have advice on how to get the hardness out of denim material when jeans are washed?" she asks. From Wales comes the advice to try Comfort fabric conditioner, whose advertising tagline "Bye Bye Cardboard Jeans" has struck a chord with one Welsh housewife.
The fact that consumers feel so passionately about FMCG brands, and Unilever ones too, that they chat about them on the web should be a source of huge encouragement to Rachel Bristow. As Unilever UK's head of new media and marketing services, Bristow is the firm's direct marketer-in-chief and a proselytiser of all techniques direct and digital.
For an FMCG company to have such commitment to direct and digital channels that it created a role to embrace both disciplines is impressive, and something few FMCGs can boast. The sector has long grappled with justifying DM as a marketing technique and has been criticised for being slow to adopt digital marketing. But for Unilever at least, all that has changed.
Sixteen months ago Bristow arrived at Unilever from Sainsbury's, where she headed the DM department. Her role at Unilever is more wide ranging - the job involves overseeing PR and Unilever's call centre. She heads a team of 22 people, as well as five staff seconded from Unilever's data consultants OgilvyOne. A key mission is to integrate digital and direct channels into Unilever's marketing plans - no mean feat in a company that is a citadel of TV advertising.
Bristow admits this is a challenge but "very exciting" at the same time. "Unilever was looking for a specialist in DM to increase its expertise in that market and I had five years' experience at Sainsbury's managing significant budgets," she says. "That's why I'm here. The speed at which digital is changing things helped Unilever realise that it needed to bring in outside expertise."
Yet the task of convincing one of the UK's biggest TV advertisers to devote a bigger slice of budget to digital and direct marketing is not a small one. Bristow's team does not commission campaigns directly but instead must persuade the brand managers of such household names as Lynx, Dove, Persil and Flora to include digital and direct communications in their marketing plans. Given the size of these marketing budgets, Bristow's position is a powerful one that calls for significant influencing skills.
Evidence of her powers of persuasion came last year when she spearheaded Unilever's first-ever cross-brand CRM programme, 'You Buy, Unilever Gives', run in Sainsbury's stores. Consumers registered for the promotion and Unilever gave 10 per cent of the price of products purchased to Sports Relief. "Think of the number of marketing directors she had to persuade to take part," says Tim Bonnet, chief executive of Tequila\London, the agency responsible for the campaign.
Bristow says having the support of two senior directors helped to get that task off the ground. But in the 16 months since her arrival at Unilever, Bristow has been building a wider platform to ensure her mission's success.
Her first major move was to consolidate Unilever's UK direct and digital agency roster from a list of 20 to seven. "Rachel wanted everything in place to have more traction," says one agency player. "She said there were far too many agencies and no consistency."
Last summer Bristow went through an exhaustive internal consultation process that included Unilever's brand managers and procurement, and narrowed the roster down to a core seven agencies. Billington Cartmell, Chemistry Communications, Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel, Tequila\London, TMW, Agency Republic and AKQA all made the cut.
Another Bristow strategy has been to focus on the company's biggest brands to demonstrate the impact digital and direct marketing can have. "We want to do CRM for all the brands but we prioritise the bigger ones because that's the area of growth for the business," she says, highlighting the CRM programmes for Flora Proactive and Dove as good examples. CRM is now established at Unilever as a way of encouraging loyalty. "Brands such as Flora have extensions like yoghurts and health drinks," Bristow says. "CRM helps consumers buy in to that quality of product and lifestyle."
The managers of those brands "welcome the guidance" Bristow's team can give. "Our brand activation managers have a thousand jobs to do and through our relationships I'm able to guide exactly what we spend on digital, where we should be doing more interactivity and direct mail, and where they fit with above-the-line," she says.
Integrated is a Bristow watchword. With consumers receiving marketing messages from a myriad of channels, her team examines the interaction between channels such as TV, the web, direct mail and sample door drops. They are helped in this by Unilever's sizeable consumer insight team and the company's media agency Mindshare.
Bristow's own roster now comprises two digital pure-plays, one integrated and four agencies with DM roots. Does she see agencies as distinctly direct or digital? "Not necessarily," she says. "We will recommend an agency based on the task in hand. So if there's a huge amount of digital, Agency Republic and AKQA are perhaps more heavyweight in that area. But you're starting to see people with mixed backgrounds within these agencies; for instance, Chemistry has the likes of Richard Adams who really improve the (digital) skill set. In this day and age, relationships with consumers are key and you can't be just good at delivering websites."
Proof that there are no walls between digital and direct for Bristow is her insistence that agencies on her roster must work together. TMW has collaborated with AKQA and Chemistry on a joint initiative, and senior staff from the various agencies come together to attend 'Think-Big Days' and discuss future plans.
A key factor in who gets what project is familiarity with the various brands. Bristow is keen to avoid "pitching for the sake of pitching" because she believes it unfair on roster agencies. "Pitching happens if an agency has never worked on the brand before but if there's an existing relationship, then no." So TMW not only does direct marketing for Persil, but manages its website also.
Is there any one direct channel demanding a bigger share of attention? "Direct mail is ahead of the others with email fast on its tail," Bristow says. "But it's about using one channel to push the others." She cites Chemistry's Dove ProAge campaign, where direct mail containing coupons was used to encourage consumers to visit the website, as an example of this.
Like most brand owners, Unilever is keen to tap into the growing popularity of user-generated content and sites such as YouTube. Bristow is sensitive to the fact that consumers might not want their personal web space interrupted by brand messages. "It's definitely something we're looking at but it's about how you play in that space to the benefit of the brand and not annoy consumers."
In October last year MySpace launched a branded community for Unilever's Lynx Boost, allowing users to interact with the character from the Lynx Boost ad, Towel Boy, and play online computer games. Bristow is coy about Unilever's other social network plans but admits the medium is not appropriate for some brands: "It works for those with an emotional connection, such as Lynx, but products like Domestos bleach won't get talked about."
While Bristow is a direct marketer by training, her digital skills have been carefully honed too. She developed serious DM credentials while at Sainsbury's - and not just of the paper kind. Bristow holds the CAM certificate and the IDM Diploma, and in practice she has embraced traditional high-volume direct mail and newer techniques, such as digitally printed, personalised direct mail. Bristow also earned her new media spurs at Sainsbury's, where she was heavily involved in marketing the grocer's online shopping service.
She believes technology brings DM closer to the heart of marketing, and that "the marketer of the future is a direct marketer". Technological developments allow traditional channels to adopt the DM principles of targeting, segmentation and testing, and Bristow is keen to make this happen in Unilever. Though she has no budget to mount marketing campaigns, she does have money to spend on managing and improving the Unilever database, hosted by Alchemetrics.
Last year Bristow worked with OgilvyOne to centralise online data capture and establish test matrices - "essential to get great results". A deal was also struck with MassMedia Studio to license its digital campaign management and testing software, Traction, which sits on top of Unilever's database of 15 million customers.
Fortune favours brave marketers such as Bristow as she educates Unilever UK on the merits of digital and direct marketing. In 2006 a total of 92 direct and digital campaigns were created, a testament to Bristow's influence. "Last year was about having all the right tools and processes (in place)," she says. "This year is about using them to create great, engaging packs and digital material, and pushing integration into action."
That Bristow is a rising star is not in doubt and Unilever is the place for marketers with talent and ambition. Her agencies admire her guts and wish her well. So too should the DM industry, because having such an advocate of direct techniques in one of Britain's largest advertisers is a major coup.
POWER POINTS
- Slimming Unilever's agency roster was key to boosting direct and digital
- Direct mail is still a key channel but email is catching up
- Unilever mounted more than 90 direct and digital campaigns in 2006
BRISTOW'S CV
1990-1995: Management trainee in Sainsbury's, rising to department
manager
1995-1997: Customer services manager, Sainsbury's Business Centre
1997-2000: Local marketing manager, Sainsbury's Business Centre
2000-2005: Direct marketing manager, Sainsbury's, rising to head of
department
2005-present: New media & marketing services director, Unilever
BRISTOW ON ... DM V DIGITAL, PROCUREMENT, DATA AND PITCHING
DM versus digital agencies
"We will recommend an agency based on the task in hand. So if there's a huge amount of digital, Agency Republic and AKQA are perhaps more heavyweight in that area. But you're starting to see people with mixed backgrounds within agencies. In this day and age, relationships with consumers are key and you can't be just good at delivering websites."
Procurement
"We have procurement [officers] who specialise in marketing and below-the-line and they really understand what the brand managers are trying to do, as well as getting the best deals. It shows we are serious about raising the standards of direct marketing in Unilever."
Data
"We have a database of 15 million names and addresses and it's a strong-performing one. It's not transactional data but it's the next best thing. We've proved our data is close to performing as well as Tesco Clubcard data. We don't buy lifestyle data as we have so much ourselves, including data that comes from our call centre, and I consider that richer than cold lists."
Pitching
"I'm not a big fan of pitching for the sake of pitching because I think that's unfair on roster agencies. Pitching happens if an agency has never worked on a brand before but if there's an existing relationship, then no."
CRM
"Clearly, we want to do CRM for every brand but we prioritise the bigger ones because that is the area of growth for the business. The bigger brands lead the way in best practice, but some of the smaller ones are doing great things in CRM."
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