Content can transform the way that consumers experience the brand, according to Unilever’s senior global brand director, who believes that the blurring of the boundaries between offline and online offers rich pickings for generating content.

“We are lucky to have brands which are very big, as we were early in the markets,” Kartik Khare acknowledged at a recent Singapore conference.

“But if it’s content, being early to market is only advantageous sometimes,” he continued. “Most of the time, it’s about the right opportunities.”

Khare looks at what he can take from offline into the online world, “and how do I use those insights to optimise my product, my app, my offerings?” (For more details, read WARC’s report: What Unilever and Domino’s Pizza learnt about sticky content in Indonesia.)

Admitting this to be “a big challenge” for Unilever’s brands, he added that “a couple of successes we’ve had in recent years have come from improving experience in terms of how you interact with the brands”.

One example is Little Brush Big Brush, a 21-episodic storytelling platform by oral care brand Signal that launched on Facebook Messenger two years ago in Indonesia and Vietnam. The chatbot-powered initiative gamifies two-minute brushing as a fun activity.

“If you are trying to get children to brush twice a day, it is a challenge globally; it is as much a challenge for a French parent as it is for an Indonesian parent,” said Khare, who looks after Unilever’s Smile – a holding name for its oral care brands, including Pepsodent and Signal.

“The insights came from offline, but it was very quickly executed online as a beautiful and nice way for children to brush their teeth with lions, bears and antelopes.”

His prediction is that more brands will use “experience for content” as a disruptive way to make an impact.

“The way the consumer experiences the brand is also a way we can disrupt,” he said. “It may not be a new idea for content to be the first to market; it could be a new point of experience that they have not experienced before with the same brand.”

Sourced from WARC