Embedding a corporate purpose through the ultimate test case
Unilever / Heartbrand (Wall's) — Adding Vitality to Life
The challenge
When Unilever launched its Vitality mission in 2004 — "to add vitality to life" — the corporate logic was clear. The new purpose was designed to drive growth by making health and wellness the engine of innovation across every category. But making that purpose credible across a portfolio as diverse as Unilever's was a different matter entirely. Ice cream was the hardest test. How do you authentically embed a health and wellness purpose in a category built on indulgence? Before the term 'purpose-washing' had even been coined, the risk was obvious: without genuine product and behavioural change behind it, the Vitality mission for ice cream would ring hollow. The Heartbrand business, operating under local names including Wall's, Algida and Magnum across 40+ countries and headquartered in Rome, became the test case for whether purpose could genuinely drive profit.
The insight
Purpose only becomes real when it changes behaviour — inside an organisation as much as outside it. The internal alignment question had to come first: getting product development, marketing, communications and leadership teams across markets to agree what Vitality genuinely meant for ice cream, and what it didn't. External communications built on a purpose that internal teams don't believe, or can't actually deliver against, fall apart quickly. This was, in essence, the internal/external problem before that framing had a name.
What I did
Leading from Weber Shandwick as part of an integrated agency team including Jack Morton and Futurebrand, I worked closely with the global Heartbrand team in Rome across both dimensions of the brief. Internally, I led stakeholder alignment work across functions and markets; helping teams agree a credible, defensible and commercially viable position for Vitality within the ice cream category. Externally, I worked across product formulation communications, packaging, advertising and PR to develop a health and wellness narrative that was honest, distinctive and built for the long term. This included supporting and communicating Unilever's commitment to healthier product options — reducing sugar and fat across the range, investing 40% of the annual €50m ice cream R&D budget into health and wellness — and telling that story in a way that felt like genuine progress rather than corporate spin.
The impact
The programme helped establish a credible platform for Unilever to talk honestly about health, wellness and ice cream, framing indulgence and wellbeing not as opposites but as a genuine tension the brand was actively and transparently working to resolve. Vitality-led innovation went on to become one of Unilever's primary growth engines, cited consistently in quarterly results as a key driver of performance across 2005-2007, with underlying sales growth running at 5-6% in strong periods. More personally, this was the brief that first showed me that the internal and external challenges are almost always the same challenge — and that, often, you can't fix one without addressing the other.