After more than 15 years with Unilever and over a decade as Global Lead of their Rexona/Sure brand of deodorant, Emily has led numerous high impact global campaigns and strategic partnerships.
The Sure brand, known as Rexona globally, is over a hundred years old, but Emily’s focus is very much on the future, developing on-going partnerships with Manchester City FC, the reigning World Club Champions, Chelsea Football Club and the UEFA Women’s Euro Tournament, recently won by England.
This is part of a broader strategy to drive brand growth, global visibility and deeper consumer engagement. Her work has been instrumental in unlocking new audiences, delivering measurable commercial returns and helping to establish Rexona as the world’s number one deodorant brand.
Unilever is the host partner of the forthcoming Brands and Sponsorship Summit, at Unilever House in London on September 25th. They are also partners of the ISC Women’s Sport Business Summit at the National Gallery in London on September 30th.
Emily on the value of sport to businesses 📈:
“The audience with sport is fundamentally different from any type of other audience and we really try to think about the idea of fans when we are in the sport arena, because the concept of being a fan is far different from when you are a consumer or a shopper.
Consumers and shoppers are quite cold relationships, it’s quite detached and it’s very transactional. Whereas when you engage with someone when they are in the mind-set of being a fan, they are highly engaged, they are way more emotional and it’s a really rich territory to be operating in.”
Emily on Rexona’s relationship with football⚽:
“The reason we kicked off this programme was because we were losing men to our competitors and the long and short of it was we worked out the best way to engage men was either via sport or through the news. Nobody wants to go after the news because it is so polarising, so we went after sport.
Within sport, the number one sport in the world is football and so it was a bit of a no-brainer that we would go to football. Now, when these programmes kicked off, it was very much through the focus that we were losing men and needed to engage with men. The programmes have evolved now to include the women’s teams.”
Emily on getting campaigns right after M&S partnered with players who dropped out of the Women’s’ Euro before it started 💡:
“It can be the nature of sport unfortunately that it’s so unpredictable. We actually had a scenario with the Men’s Euros last year where our ambassador was Ben Chilwell and he didn’t get selected and so we were in an ‘OMG moment’ and had to pivot very quickly and that’s where our relationship with Cole Palmer started.
“At the last minute and through our relationship with Chelsea, we managed to sign a very quick-fire IP Rights deal with Cole which then sprung into a formal ambassador relationship. Sometimes, it is really hard to pivot in these moments, but if anyone out there is thinking of entering into Sports Marketing, you just have to embrace that these things are unpredictable.”