UNILEVER'S EFFORTS TO

PROPEL FORWARD ITS SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES

Unilever, a global manufacturer of consumer products such as Dove soap, Ben and Jerry's ice

cream, Lipton ice tea, Axe deodorants, and many other widely used products, is aiming to lead the

market in its ability to run a sustainable business enterprise. As part of this effort, they published

their Sustainable Living Plan in November 2010. Included in this plan were their ambitious goals

to reduce the environmental footprint of Unilever by 50 percent and source all of their agricultural

inputs from sustainable growers by 2020.

Knowing that these goals will be challenging to achieve, Unilever turned to the power of the crowd

to develop initiatives to meet these targets. In April 2012, they hosted a 24-hour global

crowdsourcing event, called the Sustainable Living Lab, to generate creative ideas on how to

improve their sustainability. Speaking of the challenges facing Unilever as they strive to lead the

market in sustainability, Miguel Pestana, VP of Global External Affairs at Unilever, stated, "We

can't solve these issues on our own. We need to engage with civil society, companies, government,

and other key stakeholders." Unilever designed this as an invitation-only event where they would

get input from sustainability leaders and experts. The response they received from invited

participants was very positive, with over 2200 individuals, including over 100 Unilever managers,

coming together to co-create ideas and solutions to advance Unilever's agenda of increasing the

sustainability of their business and product line. They hosted discussion groups on four broad

topics that encompassed activities across the entire value chain of Unilever. The topics discussed

were sustainable sourcing, sustainable production and distribution, consumer behavior change, and

recycling and waste.

The boards generated a large volume of discussion and also triggered a follow-up survey

completed by over 400 participants. Unilever sees this event as a starting point, noting the need to

remain committed to further developing the ideas generated in the event. Specifically, they plan to

use the discussions as a basis on which to extend current and develop new partnerships with

participating firms and organizations to help them achieve their sustainability goals. As one

participant noted, "This was a great step to enable external specialists to collaborate with internal

Unilever experts on key issues. This in itself was a significant step. The next step is to see how

this could lead to collaboration that helps Unilever to drive more change to create a more

sustainable sector."

Discussion Questions

1) Categorize and tabulate all the essential information given in the case.

2) What Strategic Intend the Unilever wants to pursue? What goal(s) does it want to pursue?

3) Comment, is this activity is a means of CSR or a general measure and sustain a

competitive advantage?

4) What external and internal stakeholders does the Unilever have involved into this

sustainability project? What other stakeholders must have been involved?

5) What lesson did the Unilever learnt from this project? Suggest Unilever a few strategies

based on the information given in the case.