Adapting Content Strategies When Global Brands Face Change: Lipton

Unilever sold its tea division. Overnight, a structure that made sense inside one of the world's largest corporations became something else entirely, fragmented, directionless, and searching for its own identity.

A Content Lead was holding together teams across multiple countries and brands, with no shared language and no central point of gravity to manage social channels and the website. The content hadn't changed. The context had. And nobody had stopped to ask what that actually meant yet.

He hired me to help them find it.

I started where I always start, with the people. I interviewed C-level leaders across the business, from marketing to sustainability. Not to audit them. To listen. To understand what each person believed the company now was, what they were afraid of losing, and what they needed the world to understand about where they were going.

Because here's what I've learned across two decades of this work: you can't fix the communication until you understand the context. And you can't understand the context until you've listened to the people living inside it.

From those conversations, with a team of researchers and social media analysts, we built the shared language. Tone, message, platform. A foundation that allowed teams across borders to finally have one direction and speak with some coherence.

You can't communicate a future you haven't understood yet. My job was to help them define a content framework to serve the entire organisation during a period of transition. This is one of six stories from the field. [Read the next one →]