Unilever in Brazil

Analyze the “go-no go” study Unilever faces as it considers marketing

detergents to a low-income consumer segment in Brazil. Take into account
brand, positioning, market mix, and other relevant issues in your response.
What would your recommendation be, go or no go?

Unilever is known for its three brands in Brazil to low-income consumers; Omo,
Minerva and Campeiro. Unilever has its brand identity to preserve and could not
deliver a product to the market if it did not live up to the needs of the low-income
consumers. Unilever also had to take in consideration a part of new sales in Brazil
would take away sales from other existing brands of Unilever. Therefore, if those
sales are high, it could be that the sales in Brazil would not be profitable enough to
go to the market.
Unilever had, again, to take a look to its value proposition to see if its three
brands matched their target customer group. If Unilever wanted to start a new brand
to embrace a new value proposition, it would conflict with its own statement of
reducing its brand portfolio, which eventually could lead to less faith in the firm.
Instead of inventing a new brand, Unilever could come up with a new product.
This new product, as mentioned before, could contain ingredients from both Minerva
and Campeiro to keep few advantages of both; pleasant perfume, softness and being
both powder and soap from Minerva, because soap is most used in Northeast, and
low pricing from Campeiro. This would result in anticipating on the customers’ needs
for the powder and soap and the price which is not too high for low-income
consumers.
Pleasing customers could also be done by offering multiple sizes of
detergents, which creates a choice for customers. It might create an advantage for
Unilever, because some customers use more detergents than others and they are
now able to choose for themselves, based on their weekly income. The chance of
pricing a product too high or too low is less likely if customers have more to choose
from.
Unilever wants to reach a wide range of possible customers and therefore
needs to promote its new product with primarily media advertising, which also
minimalized its cost-per-contact. Therefore, it is also important Unilever used the
right distribution. With its existing network of generalist wholesalers, it has larger
costs due to secondary local wholesalers, but it has a wider range of supermarkets.
Yet, there is where a large problem lies. Low-income consumers do not buy there
products from larger stores, but go more to their traditional retail stores with little
checkout registers. Unilever should thus focus on specialized distributors, even if the
size they deliver is less than generalist wholesalers. They could use the difference in
costs from specialized distributors and generalist wholesalers to get more specialized
distributors to still get enough products in retail stores.
In conclusion, Unilever should go to the market, but, if only, they could deliver
to the market what the customers want and being able to increase their market share
while being profitable enough to retain the market.