Unilever
Unilever is a multinational corporation selling consumer goods including foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products.
Context
Brief
At the beginning of 2016, Unilever had an ambitious plan to bring a large portion of its design work in-house. The effort started with a pilot within the Homecare Department and was led by a digital transformation team. I was hired through Sapient as a design consultant to help the team make the transition.
Core team
Yael Olivo - Product designer
Elisa Mendes - Data analysis consultant
Sara Masters - Digital Transformation Manager
Georgina Park - Content Strategist
Challenges
Understand the home care brands ecosystem
I conducted interviews with each of the Home Care brands to understand how they are positioned in the market, their brand values, and the team composition, as well as their needs in terms of design.
Map and collect assets
Each brand team liaised with multiple agencies to take care of their needs, such as creating and maintaining brand guidelines, producing and localising assets for e-commerce, creating marketing campaigns, and maintaining their social media presence and corporate website.
I mapped who owned each brand’s assets such as logos, guidelines, and fonts, and worked closely with the newly formed asset library team that was at the time implementing and customising Box as the unified asset library solution.
Establish goals for the pilot
Working with the digital transformation team, I identified which design tasks could be brought in-house. Those were tasks that
required only one designer
could be executed following brand guidelines
had long delivery times compared to the task itself, due to briefing, approval and billing processes.
We focussed on e-commerce asset production and localisation, presentation design, and social media assets.
Define briefing and delivery process
I created briefing documents and delivered presentations to each brand team to establish the new internal processes and manage their expectations.
Deliver design work and track cost
I executed several design tasks and compared the cost to the estimation provided by an external agency. At the end of the quarter, I compiled a report to identify savings.
Methods & Tools
Interviews
Internal presentations
Asset production
Communication
Visual design
Excel
PowerPoint
Illustrator
Photoshop
Box
Outcomes
By the end of Q2, the overall savings for the Home Care department amounted to £43K.
The pilot was considered successful and Unilever hired Oliver Agency to create U-Studio, an in-house creative team, that was initially integrated in four different locations.
The process of centralising assets was kicked-off.
After my contract with Sapient ended, the team saw fit to have a transition period and for a few months, I acted as the point of contact between the brand teams and the newly formed U-Studio.
Learnings
Anything can be approached as a design problem: I joined the digital transformation team without a job description, and by applying the design process to the role itself I was able to understand Unilever’s need, identify a possible solution, and measure its success.
It’s fundamental to clearly define asset ownership to avoid conflict between clients and agencies.
A big change in a large team can be met with a lot of resistance. Establishing trust with the brand teams was pivotal to both the success of the pilot and the move to U-Studio.
