Driving Sustainable Living with Unilever’s Hygiene Initiative in Africa

Driving Sustainable Living With Unilever's Hygiene Initiative in Africa

Business Problem

 

  • At a time when new pain points were being born, new behaviors were shaping up and connecting with consumers had become a struggle amidst Covid, Unilever partnered with us to understand hygiene challenges in Africa to bring about purpose-driven activations and relevant product innovations. Hygiene challenges are different in different geos and Unilever wanted to take a two way approach to cater to specific needs of audiences through a personalized and nuanced lens.

What & How We Did It

  • We had data to know Whatsapp is the most-widely used messenger service in Africa & we have a panel base of +300,000 in Sa, +150,000 in Nigeria and +60,000 in Kenya. We piloted a WhatsApp chatbot interview process to capture consumer feedback on personal/household hygiene habits and needs.
  • With this approach it was possible to get robust wide representative data from an audience which would have been hard to reach with traditional approaches.
  • It helped us conduct quick analysis, facilitating a swift turnaround time. The survey was conducted in 2.5 days.
  • It took us closer to authentic real-time behavior through exchanges of texts, videos and rich media which helped us with comprehensive qualitative and quantitative insights.

Key Insights

  • Our research findings recognized that people were looking for more affordable products, promotions and discounts. Unilever addressed this challenge by ensuring the availability of a diverse range of cleaning products through smaller SKUs, making them more affordable and accessible to a broader audience.
  • There was a substantial demand for improved hygiene access in Africa with water accessibility and hot water scarcity being an acute challenge. This finding helped Unilever come up with innovative waterless cleaning products that meet basic cleaning requirements even when using cold water.

Client Impact :

The research findings on the diverse data from African countries helped Unilever create affordable products, plan distribution and take supply chain decisions keeping local nuances and challenges in mind. Our direct and more humanized research approach ensured real-time data quantitative and qualitative insights from a remote setting with minimal human intervention, enabling Unilever to take significant purpose-driven decisions with their products

Market

Unilevers South Africa

South Africa