Simulations for Unilever

Unilever is one of the world's leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods across food, home and personal product categories. Their products are distributed in 30 countries.

We've been doing a lot of thinking about simulations for Unilever and we feel that it could radically transform the way they launch new products. It will help them figure out which marketing initiatives to pursue and when to do them. Why? Partly because of the power of simulation science for capturing insights into the soft and fuzzy -- Is the advertising great or does it suck? Will consumers love our product or just think it's so-so? Will Wal-Mart gives us more shelf space than our competitors? What other brands of ours will we cannibalize and how much? We can simulate a thousand different worlds, identify the most likely and then make it happen.

Through workshops we introduce marketing teams to the power of using simulations for improving their product launches. We can track the impact of consumer need, advertising, share of voice, availability and experience and create extremely accurate scenarios that provide unrivaled foresight.

We can also simulate (easily AND cheaply) supply, economic forces, sales, promotions and competition.

There are several advantages of leveraging the investments that Unilever has already made into SAP by adding a simulation layer to their IT systems:

• Using our simulations, Unilever Brand Directors will have foresight into the likely outcomes of marketing initiatives via scenario analysis using the synthetic environment.
• Our technologies enable attitude data to be used to inform the strategic decision making process.

Finally, Brand Directors and Finance Directors can stop fighting:

Ms. Finance tells Mr. Brand -- "Hey, these projections are WAY TOO OPTIMISTIC!"

Mr. Brand and Ms. Finance then log into the secure simulation extranet and play a couple of games.

"No, no, no, we don't need to spend $20 million on media, we should use other activation tools such as kick-ass displays and creative trials" says Mr. Brand.

They change the ad spend to $10 million and add $5 million for trials and play the game to see how everything might unfold.

Over the phone (because Ms. Finance is in Germany and Mr. Brand is in Connecticut) they finally agree on a plausible scenario, print out the pro forma P& L (and load it into SAP-SEM to create an audit trail) and part ways happy with their consensus view on a plausible future outcome for this new product.

The project gets the green light and goes swiftly thru the contract gate to the launch gate. They are now only 3 months from product launch.

So what? Well, based on interviews with people around the world, the ROI may reach $500 million over three years. Plus, we're convinced that we can shorten new product launches from an average of eight months to as little as six months.

And, as Ben Franklin said, Time IS Money!!

© Justin Lyon. 2005– Present. Reproduction permitted with reference to source.

2006 - The Tipping Point for Simulation Science
Selling Simulation Science
What is Simulation Science?