MBR Issue 45

Malta Business Review
BRANDING
The Brand Manager is dead…
One of my first memories is sitting on my father’s shoulders at a 1973
Vietnam protest in Holland. As my Mom tells the story, my angelic
blonde three-year-old self made quite the impact as I shouted ‘Nixon,
Nixon - get your hands off Vietnam!’.
Hanneke Faber - President Europe & Member of the
Unilever Executive team at Unilever
My Dad left his comfortable associate math
professor position at a university in his late
twenties to head the ‘Interchurch Peace
Council’, a church-funded Dutch NGO. In
the 1980s, he led the massive European
anti-nuclear movement, galvanizing
almost 500,000 citizens to demonstrate in
Amsterdam and in The Hague. Later on, he
fought for human rights in Eastern Europe,
built close ties with leaders like Lech Walesa
in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia,
and en route, became a ‘persona-non-grata’
in East Germany with a large Stasi-file.
I took a different route. My first job after
college was in marketing, with consumer
goods behemoth Procter & Gamble. My
"Consumers, citizens,
indeed people are
looking for more.
Today, brands need
performance and
genuine purpose to
thrive.
father would jokingly refer to it as ‘The Firm’,
after the John Grisham thriller. And while
he was proud of my burgeoning career,
I’m sure his pride at times was mixed with
a sense of bewilderment about how his
daughter ended up selling Vicks VapoRub
(yes, my very first assignment) at this icon of
American capitalism.
Enter the era of
disruption
P&G was, in fact, a fabulous brand-building
school. On our way to much-revered ‘Brand
Manager’ status, P&G’s advertising gurus
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