Unilever’s Top Marketer Conny Braams Exits After 33 Years in the Business

Unilever’s most senior marketer Conny Braams has announced plans to step down after more than 33 years with the business.

Braams was appointed to the newly-created position of chief marketing and digital officer (CMDO) in 2019 following the departure of veteran brand boss Keith Weed. By 2022, she had taken a slightly different role as chief digital and commercial officer (CDCO) to reflect the “blurring lines” between digital marketing and commerce.

Braams will leave in August. She is already primed to speak on the flagship stage at Cannes Lions in June 2023 and host press at the festival.

Adweek understands the CDCO role be replaced directly with a successor due to be announced as quickly as possible.

The marketer’s surprise exit comes amid a time of change for Unilever, which is about to welcome a new chief executive (CEO) in July when current boss Alan Jope retires.

Hein Schumacher, who is currently CEO of Dutch dairy business FrieslandCampina, has been lined up for the top job in an appointment welcomed by investors. The new CEO arrives as the business is faced with battling cost pressures that continue to spill over from 2023’s economic downturn and rampant increase in fuel and raw material costs.

Jope said he was “very grateful” for Braam’s “excellent leadership” of Unilever’s marketing and commercial agenda over the last four years, “and for her impressive contribution to Unilever over three decades.”

He added: “As CDCO she has helped to transform our company into a future-fit, fully digitized organization.”

A digital legacy

Braams joined Unilever in 1990 as project manager for Cup-a-Soup and quickly rose through the ranks.

Prior to leading Unilever’s marketing across its 400-strong brand roster, she held several senior positions including SVP for Asia, Africa and the Middle East as well as EVP for Middle Europe.

In her three-year tenure she has overhauled the structure of Unilever’s marketing division, putting in place five new category marketing leaders across divisions including beauty and wellbeing, personal care, home care, nutrition and ice-cream, who reported into her.

With ecommerce emerging as a growing channel for the Ben & Jerry’s owner (Unilever’s digital revenues grew by 23% in 2022 accounting for 15% of all turnover) Braams was also laser focused on boosting the CPG’s internal digital capabilities.

She spearheaded the transformation Unilever’s 47 digital hubs—which first launched in 2019 to move away from “old ways of marketing—from centralized business units previously staffed only by “digital marketers” (ie, programmatic, audience and social media specialists) to integrate talent from Unilever’s sales, digital and e-commerce teams.

“We now call them digital, marketing, media and commerce hubs,” she told Adweek in 2022. “[We’ve changed this] because it’s crucial that people start working together and think through the totality of the customer experience and not just one element of it.”

The marketer also oversaw the brand’s ongoing sustainability initiatives as well as its first foray into Web3 marketing through brands including Hellmann’s and Sure. As part of this, she positioned herself as an advocate for ensuring advertisers were responsible for making the next iteration of the internet safe.

“Web3 can’t become the problem of the next generation,” she said in 2022. “We have a window to act, [advertisers] must put their shoulders under this and build something that is inherently transparent and puts people first.”

During the World Federation of Advertisers’ annual Global Marketer Week conference in 2022, she delivered a keynote speech saying this revolution should be accompanied by the “development of substantial, new ethical infrastructures and policies”

She added: “The internet without trust is scandal.”

News of Braam’s exit dovetails with the announcement that Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) Graeme Pitkethly will retire in May 2024.