ABSTRACT
Brand wars are a familiar feature of the fast-moving consumer goods sector. For Unilever, success (indeed, survival) has depended upon an ability to create and maintain strong brands which is why, by the 1980s, it was spending four times as much on marketing as on R&D (Jones 2005). At a global level, Unilever’s brands compete head-to-head against those of other multinationals, such as Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestlé, and L’Oreal. The ongoing competition provided by these rival brand manufacturers as they expanded aggressively beyond their home territories in the post-war decades undoubtedly shaped the development of Unilever’s international business strategy-as has been well documented (Jones 2005; Jones and Miskell 2005). Rival manufacturers, however, did not constitute the only competitive infl uence on the development of Unilever’s brands. Within most developed industrial markets, the past half-century has also witnessed the rapid growth of supermarket retailing (Seth and Randall 2001). The fi rms responsible for delivering Unilever’s brands to consumers are, in some cases, now much larger than Unilever itself. These fi rms have developed strong brand identities of their own, as recognizable to consumers as the brand names of manufacturers’ products. This chapter examines the development of Unilever’s brand strategy in the context of this increasingly important form of vertical competition.
