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August 2006 - Strategy Magazine
Who to watch

Rocket launcher - Unilever's Jillian McLaughlin
Unilever's Jillian McLaughlin prepped for the massive Sunsilk launch by immersing her team in the demo's world - and the method marketing paid off

by Annette Bourdeau
page 16

Jillian McLaughlin is perched on a white futon pushed up against a wall adorned with playful party photos of herself and her friends. Knick-knacks and trinkets have been carefully placed around the futon, which is anchored visually by colorful throw pillows and a powder blue area rug. The set-up is reminiscent of a college girl's dorm room or a young woman's first apartment, and that's exactly the point.

We're at Unilever Canada's downtown Toronto headquarters sitting in McLaughlin's office, which she has deliberately transformed into "Katie's Room" to fully immerse herself

in haircare brand Sunsilk's primary target:

25-year-old girls. "I wanted to really sink myself into who the target is...to really be obsessed with who she is, what she does," explains McLaughlin, 30, the brand building manager responsible for Thermasilk and the massive June launch of Sunsilk in Canada. She has even nicknamed the three variants of the 25-year-old bull's-eye: "Katie" in English Canada, "Christine" in Quebec, and "Kirshma," the South Asian Canadian target.

"It's a trait of wonderfully natural marketers - they just live and breathe the consumers they want to reach," notes Tony Chapman, president of Toronto-based agency Capital C. He recalls that when McLaughlin first brought her agencies on board in October 2004 to prep for the Sunsilk launch, she tried an unconventional motivational technique. "To make sure that everyone really understood Katie, Jillian invited everyone over to her condo for a Katie Party to really see the target in the three-dimensional," Chapman says. "She's just so passionate and excited, you want to do great work for her."

One of the great pieces of work Cap C has done with McLaughlin is developing 14 different account-specific promotions to help woo retailers and get Sunsilk on the shelves in spite of its off-season mid-June launch. Three of the ASPs are particularly noteworthy: for Shoppers Drug Mart, they published 600,000 copies of a content-driven mini-mag, Hairapy, to be available in store and sent out with Glow magazine. (The chain was worried about some of the original version's racier content, with Cosmo-style advice, so McLaughlin printed another 500,000 copies of that edition to be distributed at peripheral retailers like La Senza and The Shoe Company, which also get coupon space in the mag.) For Wal-Mart, Sunsilk "Hairapy guys," will be doling out tongue-in-cheek hair advice as part of a retailtainment initiative, which will be supported by two cinema ads to drive traffic to Wal-Mart. And, they're doing a DM effort with Loblaws to help the grocer drive up traffic in its haircare aisles.

McLaughlin has a solid understanding of how to give retailers what they want, thanks to a two-year stint on the sales side at Unilever selling personal care to Costco. "Costco is very demanding," she explains. "You have to put a lot of energy into understanding the internal processes." She was clearly able to get into the right headspace, as she had several key wins, including getting the AXE launch into Costco and securing an in-store Unilever fence, Costco's first-ever single-vendor fence. "I had a phenomenal relationship with my buyer. We created this Unilever fence together that allowed me to grow my business by 14% that year," she recalls. "I had a real passion for the business...[my buyer] had a real passion for winning. And, I think he also had a lot of respect for me because of my marketing experience" [she worked on Dove and Vim before being shuffled over to sales].

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