Firebrands: Unilever's Kathryn Swallow on Why “Purpose Needs a Rebrand”

For Kathryn Swallow, marketing is all about people. Peel back the layers of data, tech and creativity, and it all comes down to that. It’s a philosophy that she can trace back to her youth in a tight knit community in the South Wales valleys, where everyone knew everyone.

“The way I’m wired, it’s all about people,” says Kathryn. Whether it’s thinking about her, the consumer or even the retailer who decides whether to stock your product and the prominence they give to it, it’s all about ‘humancentricity’.

These days, she’s the worldwide head of deodorants at Unilever as well as global brand vice president for Rexona  (the deodorant brand also known as Sure, Degree and Shield in various markets around the world). Aside from a brief sojourn into another market entirely - online real estate - Unilever has been Kathryn’s home since before she started working there full time. And that’s thanks, in a large part, to the human side of the culture - as well as the scale of the brands under the Unilever umbrella.

Kathryn can remember the moment she decided she wanted to get into marketing as if it were yesterday. She was sitting in a high school business studies class, aged 16, and the teacher pulled up the iconic, controversial 1990s Oliviero Toscani Benetton campaign. “There was just something about it I loved - the impact the brand was having, the talkability and all the rest of it,” she recalls. “I literally remember the moment, and even the teacher.”

From there, Kathryn went to university where she studied business and economics. As part of her degree, she did two work placements - one of which, as it happened, was at Rexona. Even as a student, she was getting her hands dirty with some chunky projects. She was tasked with working on a Rexona for men innovation, and developed the concept for Rexona Ionic, which still exists today. Kathryn, an avid water lover who just adores being near the sea, looked up the word and learned about Buddhist monks meditating behind waterfalls because of the negative ions thrown out by the crashing water.

“I think I like being by the sea because when waves crash, you get negative ions. Basically we took that through to a brief,” says Kathryn. “What I find surprising is how much it stuck in my mind!”

That experience at Unilever had such a profound impact on Kathryn that when she left university, there was only one place she wanted to apply to. It’s a home that’s enabled Kathryn to work on culture-shaping projects that have sent out ripples of change across both the beauty industry and the marketing industry.

One of the most notable of these, perhaps, was the work she did for Dove, which went on to become the Dove Self Esteem Project. She had been asked to be acting director of the Dove masterbrand team just at the time when the local team in Canada, alongside Ogilvy & Mather Toronto, had developed the now iconic ‘Dove Evolution’ film. 

“It was a local idea, a local team and it was brilliant. As a global team, we were like, ‘hang on a minute, this is a big thing for this brand, so let’s build it a proper big activity and put our weight behind it’. It really started the next generation of work for the brand. It was also when we created and rolled out what is now known as the Dove Self Esteem Project.”

Within a matter of months, they’d put out two or three new iterations, one of which controversially threw down the gauntlet to the wider beauty industry. It’s an experience that really opened Kathryn’s eyes to the responsibility marketers bear and the influence they can have on society, and really crystallised Unilever’s position as a purpose-driven business.

“From the days of Lord Lever, it was purposeful; to create a business to help people around the world be clean and healthy, and to look after his workforce,” says Kathryn. From her perspective, purpose is still key in business.

“I think purpose gets a very bad rap. I think purpose needs a rebrand,” she says. “To me, purpose is why you exist. What problem are you really trying to solve in the world that has to be linked to your product? If it’s linked to your product, then you have something that’s meaningful and different. At the end of the day, as marketeers, we need to be driving differentiation. We don’t want to be the same as everyone else.”

When Kathryn took on Rexona, establishing the brand’s purpose was her first priority. “What’s the beating heart of the brand? Once you’ve got that, I think the rest follows: the innovation plans, the communication; you start to connect in a meaningful way with consumers, and a way that sets you apart from the rest. I think where it goes wrong and where brands get slated is where there’s no credible link, and then it looks like you’re jumping on a bandwagon. But if it links to your product, purpose sells. So it positively impacts society and the top and bottom line.”

It’s a philosophy that has paid dividends - under her watch, Rexona has become a $2.6bn brand with double digit growth.

In between all of these achievements, somewhere around the mid-late noughties, Kathryn felt ready for a change. Aged just 29, she’d received a call from the online property platform Rightmove, who were looking for a marketing director. It was a proposal she found a bit ridiculous but with her innate drive, she figured she might as well apply. “The other thing was, I had a lot of friends at the time who were doing quite entrepreneurial stuff. I kept wondering, [after] I had just entered this big behemoth of an organisation, whether there was another world out there that works differently. And what would that be like?”

It was a huge gear shift. Digital platform businesses were still fairly new and, at the time, Rightmove was in need of a huge marketing transformation. The marketing team was largely focused on writing leaflets, and there was little insight into the wider market or the size of competition. Rightmove was incredibly successful, an early leader in the sector, but in danger of losing that position. So Kathryn had a lot to offer. But there was also a lot to learn - particularly around data.

“If I think back to then, in marketing and CPG, you didn’t discuss it. You didn’t really even have customer retailer data at your fingertips, because online shopping wasn’t such a thing,” says Kathryn. “Obviously, it was a powerhouse of data from the users on their site. So, really seeing the value of understanding people on their journey, what they’re doing, what do they need, and linking that to being able to serve them or communicate, that was a big thing.”

These days, of course, data is a major aspect of marketing at Unilever and, for a people-focused Kathryn, an invaluable tool in the quest to become truly human-centric. Moreover, working in a smaller business where every penny had to work as hard as possible, value creation and operational effectiveness was key. These days, those are just as important to Unilever, so Kathryn definitely had a head start.

And the final big lesson was a real perspective shift - the unexpected overlap of B2C and B2B categories. “[Rightmove] is a B2B and a B2C business, because you need the consumers to be the eyeballs on your website, but unless the estate agents are giving you property, they won’t be looking at anything,” says Kathryn. “We never talk about that in CPG, but it’s the same… if you think about it, that mindset is important in our world, because if you’re going to meet the needs of the retailer, you’re going to win.”

In 2009, Kathryn returned to her home at Unilever, bringing with her a host of new skills and perspectives that came at just the right time. Her new understanding of data, value creation and the liminal space between B2B and B2C has been a game changer.

These skills have indubitably proven to be crucial as Kathryn has navigated the cost of living crisis experienced by many markets, which has been difficult for consumers and marketers alike over recent years. Authenticity and transparency are non-negotiable for Kathryn and she believes that the better you understand the audience, the more positive, interesting and edgier work you can create. That’s a philosophy that particularly rings true in tough times.

“Not trying to be repetitive, but I think it comes back to the people point. You’ve got to understand what’s going on in the world. One of the things I really value and try to hold close, as well as use as a criterion for recruitment, is curiosity… Unless you understand [what’s going on] you can have all manner of problems on your hands, whether that’s becoming totally irrelevant to people because you bring in innovations at a time that’s not right for them, or [putting out] communication that can cause a backlash.”

Recently, Kathryn’s been taking on two major shifts in particular. One is the move to become more social-first. As a global brand, Rexona has over 100 countries to juggle and the challenge is to scale social-first marketing while balancing the needs of a global brand and local teams. 

The other is to seriously develop its partnerships and build momentum in that space. In 2023, Rexona partnered with FIFA as sponsor for both the men’s and women’s World Cups and the brand ambition is to ‘become synonymous with football’. They’re already far along with their plans for the 2026 male World Cup, and are about to start work on the 2027 women’s World Cup. In order to maximise the partnerships and bring the retailers along for the ride, they require huge lead times. For Kathryn, supporting women’s football is a true passion that is personal - both of her daughters play football. And while supporting the sport is a massive differentiator for Rexona, there’s space for more brands. She refers to it as ‘still quite an unsaturated market’. “I think people think it’s further along than it is,” she says.

Kathryn’s eyes are firmly on the future. Rexona, as the first brand to have a clinical antiperspirant, has always thrived thanks to its innovation. Right now, the macro trends that are really exciting the team and opening up interesting avenues include health and well-being, where people are making more conscious decisions in pursuit of their desire to live longer and healthier lives. Another exciting, more colourful trend that is inspiring the team is ‘joyfulness’. 

“Constantly being a leader in that industry is quite important to us as a brand,” says Kathryn. “We need to keep that momentum, so deeply understanding some of those trends is critical to how we show up in that world.”

And understanding that comes right back to what’s always been important to Kathryn. Understanding people.