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It’s anchored in four clear priorities:
Creating value – focusing on the fastest-growing segments where consumers see clear, premium benefits and are willing to trade up.
Asserting our leadership – creating new segments, new benefits, new formats, and elevating partnerships. We’re setting the agenda for our categories rather than following the market.
Winning with our entire portfolio – each one of our brands plays a distinct role, contributing to our category leadership at scale and providing value at every price point.
And shaping the future – we’re investing in strong insight and foresight capabilities, powered by AI, so that we can anticipate macro shifts, stay ahead of culture, and build the next wave of growth.
This is a core pillar of our Desire at Scale strategy. In practice, it means we’re connecting our brands to major cultural moments in a way that not only increases visibility but also increases relevance.
Done well, these activations surprise and delight, and encourage non-users to reappraise our brands, winning new consumers and future-proofing our growth.
Prioritising cultural relevance in marketing is already delivering results, with stronger visibility and digital engagement, more organic mentions of our brands, and brands that are genuinely part of the conversation.
It’s also helping us to collaborate more with retailers, strengthening our in-store execution to improve visibility, assortment, displays and total distribution points, ensuring every consumer finds a clear and compelling reason to choose Unilever brands. Ultimately, this translates into incremental turnover in the short term and increased penetration over the long term.
Dove is consistently setting the standard for us in terms of perfectly timed brand partnerships that land in culture authentically. Its Crumbl and Bridgerton activations showed the power of bold, well-executed collaborations, building anticipation on social and launching limited-edition products that consumers rushed to buy.
And as Official Personal Care Sponsor for the FIFA World Cup 2026™, our brands are activating across the globe this summer. During the tournament, our Power Brands Dove, Dove Men+Care, Axe, Rexona and Pepsodent will be engaging with over 50,000 creators live at the speed of culture. Alongside that, we will have displays in millions of stores, carrying more than 180 limited-edition FIFA World Cup™ products. The scale is enormous.
This is an incredible opportunity to show up at the world’s biggest cultural moment on a truly global scale and with relevance that only a platform of this magnitude can deliver. I’m proud that each Personal Care Power Brand has a role that is both distinctive and true to its DNA.
For Rexona: The tournament is full of emotional highs and lows. You win, you lose, there’s drama and sweat. But Rexona, the #1 deodorant brand in the world, promises it will never let you down.
For Axe: Whether it’s costumes, crazy hats, questionable moustaches or full body paint, football fans are known for strange styles at big games. Axe is leaning into that truth with its distinctive humour, promising guys can smell their best when they look their worst. A strong connection to the World Cup, with the distinctive Axe je ne sais quoi.
Dove will champion girls’ empowerment through ‘The Game is Ours’ – a campaign that celebrates girls belonging and thriving in sports.
Dove Men+Care is connecting skincare to fandom, inviting fans to ‘care for your skin, like you care for the game’.
Even Pepsodent, the leading toothpaste brand in Asian countries like Indonesia, participates and will defend teeth after the inevitable mid-match snack attack strikes.
I’m looking forward to the unexpected. There’s so much you can plan, but the reality is so many things can happen. I can’t wait to see our brands work with creators to turn unexpected moments into culturally relevant content in real time.
There’s only so much you can script and that’s why, during the tournament, Unilever Personal Care is running what we call the House of Fresh™, a content-first platform that will be live in three locations: Mexico City, New York City, and Miami. There we are bringing together creators, influencers, celebrities and our Power Brands.
We’ll be creating bespoke content designed to scale in the moment, in real time, live as the tournament happens. Live streams, social-selling, contests, football one-on-ones, watching games together, all of it fuelled by what’s actually happening in the stadiums and fan zones. The goal is to flood the feed with content generated by real people, real influencers, real celebrities, powered by our brands.
The ecosystem is in place, the infrastructure is in place, the people will be there, the brands will be there. Let the magic happen!
It’s all about showing up in a way that is authentic and true to your brand – not simply buying visibility. It requires real clarity on what your brands stand for.
The brands that will win are the ones that create participation, spark conversations, and at the same time, make people see them in a fresh and relevant way. Ultimately, culture is not a shortcut to growth. It’s a way to build stronger brands over time – brands that are more talked about, more desired, and more meaningfully connected to people’s lives.
Rani Al Hajji is Chief Growth & Transformation Officer for Unilever’s €13.2 billion global Personal Care business group. He leads category growth, customer strategy and brand experience for Power Brands including Dove, Axe, Dove Men+Care, Rexona and Pepsodent.
Desire at Scale is Unilever’s strategy for combining advanced science, premium design and cultural relevance to create irresistible brands and products. Building brands in culture is the cultural relevance pillar of this strategy.
SASSY (an acronym) is Unilever’s framework for designing products that deliver Superior Science, Aesthetics and Sensorials, and are Said by others and Young spirited.
The Personal Care Power Brands activating around the FIFA World Cup 2026™ include Dove, Dove Men+Care, Axe (known as Lynx in the UK), Rexona (also known as Degree and Sure), and Pepsodent. Each brand is showing up with its own distinct campaign and creative platform.
Photo credits: Images from Unilever Personal Care’s House of Fresh activation are by Chris Lavado.
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