A newly released Unilever Brand Health Tracking Report finds that the consumer goods giant enters the second half of 2026 with a fundamentally healthy brand position, anchored by a corporate Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +31 and aided brand awareness of 95 percent, even as the data highlights a persistent gap between how well consumers know the Unilever name and how quickly it comes to mind at the moment of purchase.
The report, which tracks consumer perception, brand awareness, top-of-mind recall and Net Promoter Score across four consecutive quarters, positions Unilever second among its major consumer packaged goods (CPG) peers on customer loyalty, trailing only Colgate-Palmolive and ahead of Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Mondelez International.
According to the tracker, aided awareness of the Unilever corporate brand and its household-name portfolio has held close to saturation, moving from 93 percent to 95 percent of category consumers over the past year. Unaided awareness, the tougher measure of whether consumers can name Unilever without prompting, climbed five points to 63 percent, while top-of-mind awareness the share of consumers who name Unilever first in the category grew from 21 percent to 26 percent. The report describes this gap between broad awareness and top-of-mind salience as "the single most actionable signal" in the data, suggesting that future marketing investment should prioritise category-entry-point messaging over further reach-building, since consumers overwhelmingly already know the brand.
On consumer perception, the tracker finds trust and quality remain Unilever's strongest brand equities, scoring 71 and 74 respectively on a 0–100 index. Perceptions of sustainability and ethics recorded the largest gain of any attribute measured, rising from 60 to 66, alongside a smaller improvement in perceived innovation, from 55 to 58. Perceived value held broadly steady despite sector-wide input cost inflation, which the report characterises as a resilient result. Relevance how much consumers feel the brand speaks to their own lives posted the smallest gain, pointing to an opportunity for more personalized, category-specific storytelling.
Unilever's overall Net Promoter Score of +31 breaks down into 54 percent Promoters, 23 percent Passives and 23 percent Detractors, a composition the report says is solidly positive by CPG conglomerate standards. However, NPS varies sharply by age, climbing from +22 among 18–24-year-olds to +41 among consumers aged 66 and over, with each intermediate age band 25–34, 35–44, 45–54 and 55–65 falling neatly along that gradient. The report flags this roughly nineteen-point gap between the youngest and oldest cohorts as a clear strategic risk, since younger consumers are disproportionately influential in driving earned media, social advocacy and long-run category growth.
Benchmarked against its closest rivals, Unilever trails only Colgate-Palmolive, whose more focused oral, personal and home care portfolio delivers an estimated NPS in the mid-thirties. Unilever's broader food, beauty and home care conglomerate structure sits ahead of Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, both in the high teens to high twenties, and comfortably ahead of Mondelez International. The report also notes that Unilever continues to be recognised in Kantar's BrandZ methodology, which values the world's top 100 brands at a combined 13.1 trillion US dollars up 22 percent year-on-year underscoring rising competitive intensity as technology and AI-native companies increasingly dominate global brand-value rankings.
The tracker cautions that corporate-level figures mask considerable regional and category variation. In developed markets across Western Europe and North America, where awareness is already saturated, the brand conversation centres on differentiation and price-value perception amid ongoing cost-of-living pressure. In faster-growing markets across Asia, Latin America and Africa, individual Unilever portfolio brands often carry stronger independent recognition than the corporate Unilever name itself, meaning blended corporate metrics may understate underlying brand strength. Personal care and beauty lines score more strongly on innovation and relevance, the report finds, while home care and food brands lead on trust and value as everyday household staples.
The report outlines four priorities for brand and marketing leadership: converting near-universal awareness into sharper top-of-mind salience; closing the youth loyalty gap through digital-first storytelling and product innovation aimed at 18–34-year-olds; continuing to build sustainability and innovation credentials, the two fastest-improving perception attributes; and linking brand health metrics more closely to commercial outcomes such as category share and repeat-purchase rate. Taken together, the authors conclude, the data supports a growth agenda built on strengthening engagement with younger consumers rather than