Most Creative Marketers: Aline Santos

Arguably one of the most famous marketers in the country, Unilever’s global executive vice-president of marketing and its chief diversity and inclusion officer has had a very well documented career. Her passion for using marketing and advertising as the levers to build equities in the world, while being almost obsessive in pursuing her brands’ purpose in the forefront of cultural change is no secret. She has become an embodiment of purpose. And let’s not forget with almost 4,000 followers on her personal Instagram account - which offers a slice of her life and soul in full blast - Aline also holds the status of a nano influencer.

Striking accolades for a marketer.

But for a marketer that is always centre-stage, and someone I have interviewed several times over the years, what more is left to talk about? With Aline, that has never been a challenge. So I begin by asking her about her fame and how she feels about her reputation being somewhat defined by ‘purpose’ and diversity and inclusion.

Fame is not something a global marketer of a behemoth like Unilever need address, though Aline does remind me that she’s been in the UK for only about four years (after joining Unilever Brazil in 1989). “I didn't have any kind of intention to become chief diversity and inclusion officer for Unilever,” she adds. But then it’s never been a vanity project for her. “I was revisiting my whole career and the things that make me most proud are where we helped connect people, or create a sense of oneness that makes you belong or become part of a family. And that is why I needed to start moving more and more into diversity and inclusion, because that was very connected to my own purpose.”

I wonder, given her more than three-decade long career with Unilever, whether the clarity of finding purpose for her brands and her business means that Aline has found her own too? “My voice and my actions, they are here, to un-stereotype the world and make human kind again,” she says. “And that's exactly what I think I'm here for. Whether I’m having conversations with my family, at work, or on the boards that I participate on, that is something that I feel that I need to do. The more lives I can touch, or sometimes even bring systemic change through advertising, I will do it.”

Aline gives the example of the CROWN Act campaign from Dove, designed to address a problem Black people frequently encounter - hair discrimination. The Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Coalition included reaching out to Black state and federal legislators in the US to drive legislative change to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles. The bill was recently passed in seven US states, including California, New York, New Jersey and Washington.

“That is what moves me, and I believe this is what I’m here to do.”

Aline’s big challenge at the moment is how to scale creativity that tunes into cultures and “create a movement”. More now than ever, advertising needs to matter to consumers. It needs to tap into something meaningful, needs to reach the right people at the right time, but that's not an easy formula to perfect. So, should all brands be purposeful? Aline lights up at the question. Her answer is an affirmative. “There are endless possibilities for brands to be purposeful. The challenge is that at the moment not all our brands have a purpose because to find the right purpose is an art, though I don't need every advertising campaign to be a movement. But ideally, our advertising, our marketing and the combination of everything that we do would ignite a positive change. In behaviours, in attitudes. In our societies.”

Not one to sit still, was it this desire to “make human kind” that drove her recently join the board of Ikea and the corporate board of the Victoria & Albert Museum? (She does not sit on the board of Unilever). And has that opened her eyes to almost a different approach to creativity?

“When I started talking to Ikea, I had lots of interviews and my goodness, the more I talked to people, the more I loved their culture - all very similar to the culture in Unilever. As a business, Ikea sees its responsibility as going well beyond the company, with its interest in sustainability, social inequalities. And their love for the brand, and how it deploys creativity - all of that spoke directly to my heart.” For Aline, it’s not about a different approach to creativity but the idea of generosity that runs through the business that attracted her to Ikea.

Aline is equally effusive about her appreciation for V&A. She equates her first board meeting at the Museum like “being in a dream.” How else do you really describe being part of an organisation that put together the ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ exhibition or once explored the impact of the Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli - two of Aline’s favourite exhibitions there. She recalls one of her first conversations at the board meeting about art, fashion, culture, and progressive ideas around women's empowerment. “I learnt, for instance, about the role that Mary Quant played in British fashion and society. Being a Brazilian, I knew the name but didn’t quite understand the impact she had.

“I really was pinching myself because the Museum wants to democratise all the knowledge and the beauty that sits inside it. Creativity, of course, is at the heart of the V&A. Creativity is what is going to move it forward,” she says, while adding that creativity is also what brings transformative ideas to both Unilever and Ikea and will help move the industry forward.

Aline calls it the industry’s “renaissance movement.” Creativity, she says, feeds the soul and makes life more interesting - something that businesses like Unilever and Ikea understand perfectly - and she insists that all brands should think both creatively and culturally about what’s happening in the world and where they could play a role.

Her appreciation for creativity and everything it has to offer - where does this stem from? Creativity, she says, is not something you are born with. “It is something to develop, and is just a matter of the references that you are able to access. Like my grandmother, Vanessa. A Venetian, from Italy, she always wanted us all to have an understanding of the visual arts. Everything from fashion to cinema, she pushed us all to understand the different levers of creativity.”

Aline talks about her brothers - one a famous creative director in Brazil and another a leading war photojournalist - and her modest house on the beach in Sao Paolo, Brazil where her parents allowed the kids to paint on walls and allowed them all the freedom to be. “And freedom is a key element for creativity, isn't it?” she asks.

As a student of metaphysics - Aline has been studying it for the last four years - it is a question that definitely strikes at the heart of our industry, an industry that has been busy looking for its own purpose and merit.

Perhaps, then these are the words to live by. "I feel I’m now in my prime. And have learnt how to be fear-free, not fearless but fear-free. And when you are truly fear-free, you are unstoppable. There is nothing that will hold you back.”

It strikes me that this famous marketer is on her way to becoming a legend soon.