Vaseline was founded greater than 150 years ago and has became a top performer of late for parent company Unilever, having seen an 11% compounded annual growth rate over the past 4 years, becoming a billion dollar brand and growing volume greater than 10% in each 2024 and the primary half of 2025. The brand also serves as a template for the CPG giant’s portfolio.
“It has been on a remarkable journey, pioneering the type of desire at scale pondering we would like now to duplicate across all our brands,” said CEO Fernando Fernandez on Unilever’s Q2 2025 earnings call.
Executives attribute Vaseline’s renewal to a mix of product innovation that taps into trends in a reworking body care space and powerful marketing that follows Unilever’s intensifying give attention to social-first and culturally-rooted efforts. The brand inserting itself into TikTok trends around nighttime routines, is one recent example.
“We reallocated our budget to lean rather more into creator-led content, as Unilever calls it, leaning more into creators, influencers, [user-generated content] to inform the brand story a bit more, versus only being led by the brand,” said Kate Godbout, head of Vaseline brand for North America.
Vaseline earlier this month teamed with reality TV star Amanda Batula and her Loverboy beverage brand, bringing together packs that included three cans of Loverboy iced tea and one bottle of Vaseline’s Glazed & Glisten Gel Oils. The brands marketed the partnership with an experiential event in Brooklyn and saw the packs sell out inside 12 hours of launch.
“Especially for a heritage brand, the concept of cultivating community is so essential,” Godbout said. “Deeply understanding your consumer on essentially the most intimate level — their hopes, dreams, desires, barriers to using product — beyond basic needs… really understanding their passion points, determining how you possibly can tap into that and providing real utility of their lives.”
Godbout joined Unilever in July after three years as CMO for Scholl’s Wellness Company and former stints with L’Oréal, Neutrogena and Mattel. Marketing Dive spoke with the manager concerning the evolution of the marketing organization, the award-winning “Vaseline Verified” campaign and the way artificial intelligence will change how marketers work.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: How has Unilever brought together innovation and marketing within the organization?
KATE GODBOUT: Earlier this yr, there was a structural change in the wonder and wellness group where we brought together end-to-end marketing. There’s one half of my team that is focused on product innovation and portfolio strategy, but the fantastic thing about it is that they’re very closely working alongside our demand-creation team. We’ve brought specialists in who deeply understand PR, influencer, creator-led content, media strategy, more traditional promoting creative and dealing with agencies.
We have either side of the home together as one, so we’re meeting weekly as a team in a forum we call the “culture squad,” where we’ve got the innovation team sitting alongside our agencies and the demand creation teams to speak concerning the signals which might be happening in culture and things which might be getting loads of traction for the brand because it pertains to our social content. Those meetings are supposed to be very motion oriented.
But then we even have richer conversations about the best way to construct social-first innovations. How will we take all this great stuff we’re learning in culture, all of the things that customers are really connecting with, after which feed that into the innovation funnel to assist inform the names of the products, the textures or the formats, what type of content strategy we would like to construct, how we would like to bring it to life digitally and in-store.
Unilever had the intuition to ensure you might have the best people at and across the table to have these conversations and your agency expertise embedded into those conversations on a weekly basis. Sometimes I’m wondering if we needs to be doing it greater than once per week, because culture moves so fast. But it’s a very great framework to have in place of constructing sure that signals are being read and the dots are being connected.
The “Vaseline Verified” campaign is a superb example of a social-first effort. What are you able to tell me about the way it got here together?
We saw that there have been over three and a half million organic posts happening within the social space, mainly on TikTok, but definitely on Instagram as well, where people were using Vaseline for very unexpected purposes, in addition to expected purposes. There was this amazing versatility of the product being showcased.
We also tapped into the insight that customers are overwhelmed and bombarded with information on social, and so they’re having a very hard time discriminating what’s real, what’s protected and what’s effective versus what’s just hype.
We took this community movement of individuals talking concerning the use of product, and truly brought it into the labs where the science became a part of the story. It was playful, fun and quirky, but we tested all of those amazing hacks that customers had for Vaseline jelly within the lab, and either confirm that they’re protected and effective to make use of the product for, or they are not effective in any respect.
We awarded these creator seals. We got them involved within the conversation. We pushed out our own content on other “Verified” hacks of what we have already tested that the product may very well be used for.
It showcased a special personality of Vaseline as a brand. It allowed those creators into the conversation to co-create the brand. And there have been real, quantifiable results tied to it: we had a 43% uplift in our sales, over 136 million views and large positive sentiment of 87% with consumers.
As social-first investment increases, how are you measuring the channel?
We have a system in place where we track metrics like buzz, sentiment, shares and online discoverability. We track that on a quarterly basis. How will we move the needle on those metrics as we design campaigns? There’s loads of internal discussion on the best way to make the campaign stronger.
We’ve surrounded ourselves with really strong agency partners which might be super creative and take into consideration that unlock. You get the amazing brain power of all these folks that are it from different angles … to actually aid you mold and shape the campaign with loads of great, creative minds all coming along with the identical common, aligned goal.
How does Vaseline’s “White Lotus” partnership fit into the image?
Entertainment property or brand collaborations are all about intentionality. How do you discover ways to raise your brand values and what the brand stands for — the personality, the tonality you desire to bring forward with things which might be super culturally relevant — that you realize will get loads of buzz, but have a method to bring your product in to construct relevancy with consumers in an interesting way?
“White Lotus” was led out of Southeast Asia markets with Gluta-Hya. They got loads of amazing traction out of it based on where “White Lotus” was filmed; it was really relevant to bring that product forward there.
Collabs are something that we’re very seriously and continuing to take into consideration. Who are the interesting and unexpected partners that our community really connects with, and the way will we find those partnerships to raise the brand conversation in an interesting way? We don’t need to do too many, because there’s the priority of fatigue. But in the event you do the best partnerships at the best time, it could possibly really generate loads of value for the brand and potentially herald latest consumers that may not have considered you before.
How do you see AI changing your job as a marketer?
I feel of AI as this amazing thought partner and co-pilot, but the basics of what we have learned [about] growing brands through the years, that does not go away. How do you utilize AI to assist complement workflows of things like content creation to raise your work and supply a special perspective, but to not necessarily take over what you are doing?
We’re definitely using [AI] in places, on a few of our content supply chain, but I’m also intentional about where the AI-driven content shows up with a brand like Vaseline that has such deep trust and heritage available in the market.
It’s exciting to take into consideration how much capability goes to be freed up through using AI tools and workflows, and the way that creates more room and time so that you can be creative and strategic and to think more expansively concerning the brand.
Some of the low-value-added activities my team and I are spending time on today, how can we automate that work after which liberate the time to only dream and take into consideration how that manifests in numerous product executions, activations and ways to attach with our community?
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