Is Unilever's 'An Influencer in Every ZIP Code' Approach to Modern Retail Marketing a Smart Play?
In remarks made to The Wall Street Journal's Leaders podcast, as recounted by Storyboard 18, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez made it clear that the old ways of conducting retail marketing were no longer a good fit for his company -- and that the broader paradigm was about to engage with a major shift.
Storyboard 18's lede summarized Fernandez's position as looking at the end of an era in which traditional top-down marketing efforts reigned supreme, where corporate messaging was distributed across the consumer base, and where shoppers ultimately placed firm trust in brands and retailers. Instead, shoppers now turn to influencers, AI is slowly taking command of product discovery, and marketing is a 24/7 stream rather than a few cumbersome campaigns a year.
"I want an influencer in every ZIP code in the globe. I believe that the times in which a brand was broadcasting messages and trying to convince people are gone. This is the time of many-to-many marketing," Fernandez said, pivoting to elaborate upon the difference in content production, lifespan, and delivery embodied by this shift toward content creator-driven product marketing.
"The lifespan of a video is four days. You have to create a lot of stuff. You have to do constant renewal of the way you interact with your consumers," he added.
Unilever appears to be backing up its beliefs, with a still-notable 10,000 members within its creator network when Fernandez took the helm in March 2025 -- soaring to approximately 300,000 as of this writing.
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Unilever CEO Fernandez Says Decentralized Influence May Be More Vital Than Centralized Messaging in Retail or Brand Marketing Moving Forward
One-way messaging -- a carefully crafted campaign based around a theme, visual assets, finely tuned copy, musical jingles or sound bytes, and maybe a popular celebrity -- might have defined marketing campaigns for brands and retailers for decades, but tomorrow's leaders will need to look to a decentralized sphere of influence instead, according to Fernandez.
Today's and tomorrow's shopper is increasingly interested in peer recommendations, creator communities, and engaging with AI models to help find new brands or products, per the Unilever chief executive.
"We used to do marketing at the time in which doing a couple of innovations per year in a brand, doing a couple of ads and putting it on TV was a model of doing marketing," Fernandez said, going on to add that the challenge has shifted from managing a few major campaigns a year to curating countless conversations in real-time.