Prior to the Pampers-UNICEF partnership, UNICEF had been making important strides towards MNT elimination for almost two decades. However, public awareness of the disease was low and donor funding in support of the effort increasingly inadequate. Now, the Pampers-UNICEF campaign has resulted in millions of media hits globally for MNT, providing an extraordinary level of exposure for the disease and an important platform for UNICEF to secure additional donors.
The case finds that UNICEF’s brand created interest in the campaign on the part of the media, donors, and consumers and has proved invaluable to P&G’s recruitment and retention of highly talented staff. At the same time, P&G’s marketing power and reach has helped deliver sources of new donations for UNICEF on a sizeable scale.
Such a ground-breaking partnership between two large and distinct organizations is not without its complications. P&G and UNICEF faced challenges due to differences in organizational structure, priorities and timetables, sources of funding, communication with consumers, and with regard to leadership and reciprocity.
Unprecedented access to both organizations allowed Saïd Business School faculty to identify bottlenecks in the partnership’s success as well as detail how managers overcame these. Thus, through comprehensive analysis of a high-impact example, the case provides managers with insight into how one of the world’s largest non-profits and its multinational counterpart designed and implemented a global partnership to transform funding for and awareness of a social cause.
The Pampers/UNICEF case was developed as independent academic work, with support from the Pears Business Schools Partnership which aims to inspire future leaders to make a positive difference to society.