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Its marketing chiefs want to stand out with creative excellence and CSR initiatives, Jeremy Lee writes
Like an enthusiastic clergyman at a village fete, Unilever's cheery chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, is still wearing the charity T-shirt underneath his suit j acket when he breezes into the Cannes hotel bar for our meeting, shortly after delivering a sermon on the importance of sustainability.
His colleague, the rather quieter and sterner senior vice-president of marketing-thevergerto Weed's vicar - Marc Mathieu, however, seems to have changed out of his at the earliest opportunity.
Weed is keen to eulogise about a corporate social responsibility initiative that Unilever has just announced - one that helps people in developing countries get access to clean water through water purifiers (hence the brightly coloured T-shirt emblazoned with its "Waterworks" name) paid for by charitable giving.
While undoubtedly a worthwhile exercise - and one that Unilever should quite rightly feel proud of - it might also prove to be a way of sustaining consumer markets in areas of the world where the company can hope to enjoy the biggest growth opportunities.
While Weed gratefully orders a beer ("Well, it has gone midday"), a drink that was invented to overcome the hazardous problem of fetid water but came with a joyous side effect,...