HUL Winning in Many Indias | Unilever Growing with India | Harvard Business | Solved MBA Case Study

‘What’s good for India is good for Hindustan Unilever’ was one of the key outtakes from Chairman and Managing Director Sanjiv Mehta speech at the company’s Annual General Meeting which was held virtually this year. A statement undeniably confirmed by the company’s growth over the past decade.

Over a ten-year period, Hindustan Unilever (HUL) has added 26,000 crore rupees (€3 billion) to its bottom line and doubled its turnover to 45,000 crore rupees (€5.1 billion). It has also increased its market capitalisation nine times to end the decade at more than 570,000 crore rupees (€65 billion). HUL is now the second-largest Unilever business in the world.

Read on to find the lessons for growth the Chairman shared with the audience and some of the company’s plans to ensure that HUL continues winning in the next decade.

1. Leveraging the power of purpose
In 2005 Surf was HUL’s fifth-largest brand. Today it’s No.1. The first ‘Dirt is Good’ campaign for the detergent was based on the premise that ‘if while doing something good, you get dirty, then dirt is good’. The message worked because the brand’s purpose and performance aligned.

“To win in the next decade we know being purpose-led is not enough,” says Sanjiv. “We have to be future-fit – by being fully digitised, more innovative and faster to respond to the many changes shaping people’s lives every day.”

And this is already being seen in the work HUL’s brands are doing today. Across its beauty and personal care portfolio, Dove has used real-life stories to challenge societal expectations through its #StopTheBeautyTest campaign. And on Women’s Day, Clinic Plus launched a new campaign pledging to educate women to stand up against domestic violence.

2. Shaping categories of the future
During the past decade, steady growth in the Indian economy has seen an emerging middle class with evolving consumer needs and aspirations. HUL has met them through strategic acquisitions, launches and new product formats.

HUL’s acquisition of Indulekha hair oil strengthened its presence in the Premium Naturals segment and the brand has seen sixfold growth in the five years since its purchase.

HUL has also added famous brands such as Horlicks and Boost to move into the growing nutrition space. As a result, it has become one of the largest Foods and Refreshment businesses in the country.

Covid-19’s impact led to growing consumer demand for health, hygiene and sanitation products, and new products including fabric sanitiser and fruit and vegetable wash. More people doing more household chores themselves also created a surge in demand for dishwashers and saw the launch of the Vim Matic dishwasher range to meet this emerging trend.

3. Winning in Many Indias
Knowing what spaces to move into relies on knowing your customer base. “In India, dialects, customs and rituals change every 100km. To look at a country as diverse as India as one homogeneous entity is a gross under-service to the vast cultural and business opportunity it presents,” says Sanjiv.

So HUL created its ‘Winning in Many Indias’ (WIMI) model, which classifies the country as 15 consumer clusters to provide insights into product development and marketing. These are supported by 16 country category business teams that function as micro-organisations to reduce the time taken to land innovations.

One example of the model’s success is how it enabled Lifebuoy to ramp up capacity 30 times and launch 17 hand sanitiser variants in just 100 days during the 2020 pandemic. WIMI helped the team capture data and understand where demand for the product was needed most. It provided the insights to develop different SKUs, packs and labels which in turn modernised the brand to meet new consumer needs. As a result, Lifebuoy grew by 1,000 bps, and the strong demand for Lifebuoy sanitiser and handwash remains.

4. Creating inclusive growth
The drive for inclusive growth for all of India has seen HUL manufacture brands in 29 different factories in remote areas. It has also worked to enable more women to join the workforce through initiatives such as Project Shakti, which has created 136,000 women micro-entrepreneurs across 18 states.

To protect and sustain natural resources, Hindustan Unilever Foundation (HUF) has worked with villages and partners to enable more than 1.3 trillion litres of water potential through improved water management, inspired by its ‘Water for Good’ programme.

And today, 100% of HUL’s electricity is certified renewable, and it’s making solid progress with thermal energy. “We have also stepped up our efforts in plastic waste management,” adds Sanjiv. “We have collected and safely disposed of more than 100,000 tons of post-consumer plastic waste and have committed to collect and safely dispose of more plastic waste than that used in our packaging, as from this year,” he says.

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