Kristine Go is the general manager for Unilever's Nutrition business for Southeast Asia. She directs everything from marketing to innovations, planning, to forecasting. In June 2022, she was awarded Chief Marketing Officer of the year at the prestigious Asia Pacific Tambuli Awards 2022, which celebrates brands for their seamless integration of creativity, purpose, and results in their campaigns.
But Kristine is not someone who dreams of recognition or attention. She is the type who likes to keep her head low and lead from behind the scenes. Last year, when she met Google’s APAC Head for Clients and Agencies Amit Chhangani, the latter wondered why he never met her or heard of her, despite her prominent position as a regional boss of one of the world’s largest multinational corporations.
Kristine Go, General Manager of Southeast Asia Unilever
“How could I have not met or heard of you before?” he asked her. “But you couldn’t have!” Kristine responds in jest.
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Kristine explains that she likes to work behind the scenes but finds pleasure in meeting people, too. “I like meeting people because I like to hear their stories and I like to know what they can do for my business and how we can collaborate better,” Kristine tells Esquire Philippines.
Nevertheless, Kristine remains one of the world’s most potent and effective general managers of a global corporation. But who is Kristine Go before she became an award-winning Nutrition chief?
As a student, Kristine never dreamed of a job in marketing. In fact, she finished a degree in Industrial Engineering in De La Salle University, which would have led her to a career very far from what she is doing now.
“I get this question a lot. People look at me and expect me to come from some business school or that I have a background in marketing or accounting, but no. It’s been Engineering for me, and that’s where I met my husband!”
Did she ever practice Engineering at all?
“No, I didn’t!” she laughs.
But how did she end up in her current career?
“When I was in school during the latter part of my course, I did an internship at Procter & Gamble and also at Unilever. Unilever was first. Because it was a school thing, Unilever put me in the Supply Chain department,” she explains.
Ironically, it was Procter & Gamble that put her on the path to marketing.
“Just before I graduated, I got a chance to intern with Procter & Gamble. I was lucky because I won this student excellence award, and one of the prizes was to intern at P&G. During that time, I tried marketing because when I was interning at Unilever, one of my mentors was in marketing. When she saw me doing supply chain, she told me that if I ever get the chance again, I should try marketing. So I did. P&G offered me the internship, I said I would try it, and I loved it!”
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Kristine stayed in P&G even after graduating and did not go to Unilever.
PHOTO: Pau Guevarra | Esquire Philippines
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“To be fair, P&G really waited for me, as in, before I even graduated, they already offered me a job,” she says.
Kristine worked at P&G for three years and was based in Singapore. But something happened that she did not really planned for. “Nagpropose sa akin iyong boyfriend ko, nagpakasal ako, at umuwi na ako!”
Although Kristine had a great run with P&G, she felt like the sudden shift in her situation got her tied down, and she felt it was a lot harder to be in the same company because of it.
“I felt like I was stepping down. P&G actually offered me a job back home, but I felt like my career would take a pause, so I said I’ll stop, and I did stop,” she says.
Starting a family was quite a different business, after all. But eventually, she would get bored at home and decide to jump back to work again. Unilever hired her.
“I came to Unilever when I was really bored na at home, they offered me a job here in the Philippines, so I took it. But after a while, I went again to Singapore and I stayed there for eight years.”
Kristine Go is a different kind of leader.
And that’s why she won the prestigious Tambuli Award for CMO of the year.
“I think my style of leadership is one of a visionary and a warrior. It’s a good combination that I think I have. I’ve spent half my life creating things out of nothing. When it comes to marketing, the best leaders are the ones who have a clear vision and get to land them. I always start with my North Star—where do I want to take things? And then I create building blocks of how to get there. And most important, we have to take people on that journey with us. I will not be where I am today without my brilliant team behind me” Kristine tells Esquire.
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“I always start by asking, where do I want to take this based on what I know about the brand and the business? And then I try to map out how I get there. That’s where my warrior mode comes out,” she adds.
Kristine is not the type who likes to debate endlessly, in fact, it tires her. “I like to get things done, period. They would always say maybe that’s the difference because I do get things done. I don’t want to wait.”
“Siguro that’s the kind of leader that I am, someone with a good balance of being a visionary and a warrior. If you’re too much of one, you’ll end up with nothing. If you’re too much of a visionary, you’ll end up dreaming and you won’t land anything. If you’re too much of a warrior, you’ll end up continuing to do things without knowing where you want to go. But I like to believe that I’m a little bit of both, I like to dream big but I also have to see things happen.”
Although Kristine is quite an innovator herself, there are some things she likes to protect, especially if it concerns her core businesses. And it’s something she will really fight for.
“So our core business in Nutrition, and there are many, many temptations to introduce something new. You can easily go into plant-based, you can easily go into any new type of business with food, you can even go into pre-packaged meals or juices—it’s endless—but I know what pays our salaries, and that for me is something I fight for. I would fight for just landing the brilliant basics because when you are dreaming too much and thinking about landing this and that, you end up doing nothing.
"I’ve spent half my life creating things out of nothing. When it comes to marketing, the best leaders are the ones who have a clear vision, and get to land them. I always start with my North Star, where I want to take things, then create building blocks of how to get there."
“The most important thing is always business growth. I like to keep things simple. My brand of marketing is about driving the core because it’s what makes us famous. I believe that the most successful businesses are built on a solid foundation of the core business, where they have a leading position. By selling more of the stuff we already do well, we grow without adding complexity,” she adds.
What else brings out the warrior in Kristine Go? Her people.
“I will fight for our people. If there’s one thing that I feel that I really treasure, it’s the fact that in this whole journey in my almost two decades of working, I’ve actually brought people along. And I don’t think anything I’ve done would have happened if not for the people who have been on that journey with me.”
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Kristine Go, Making the Impossible, Possible
She calls it “magic”—when everything you’ve worked so hard for finally pays off to make your vision a reality. In corporate speak, it means “having a vision and landing things in the market.”
“I am grateful for the recognition, but at the end of the day, I cannot really second-guess what the judges think. But if there is one thing about me that I can tell you, it’s that I love bringing things, impossible things, to life—I’d like to think that the best things that my team and I have landed are the things that people think could not be done, but we made them happen.”
And that “magic” was what exactly the Tambuli Awards was looking for. They looked at Kristine’s track record with Unilever for the past 15 years, and they saw three exceptional campaigns that created significant waves around the world.
Kristine’s work with Unilever’s Lifebuoy, Foods division, and Selecta stood out for the Tambuli Awards.
It was during her time with Unilever in Singapore that she would make some of her biggest strides that would make ripples across the world.
“I was actually with the global team for Lifebuoy. It was a lot of strategy, future-thinking, and all that. But at the end of it, the core of the brand is handwashing—it’s a bar of soap!” Kristine says, reminding us of the brand's purpose of saving lives.
Lifebuoy is actually one of the oldest surviving brands of hygiene soap in the world. It was introduced by Lever Brothers in 1895 and became an essential item distributed to soldiers in World War I and World War II, helping save their lives from infections on the battlefield.
“So that brand really invests a lot in just helping people practice basic hygiene, which saves lives,” says Kristine.
In some parts of the world, the simple act of handwashing is enough to help children reach the age of five. But despite a hundred years of promoting basic hygiene and handwashing, the world has failed to instill the practice among billions of people.
"The most important thing is always business growth. I like to keep things simple. My brand of marketing is about driving the core because it’s what makes us famous. I believe that the most successful businesses are built on a solid foundation of the core business, where they have a leading position. By selling more of the stuff we already do well, we grow without adding complexity."
“Can you imagine that in 2011 when I was with Lifebuoy, only two bars of soap were getting used in a year per person in Africa? Can you believe it? Two bars of soap,” Kristine says.
Kristine and her team wanted to create a bigger impact in the world.
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“We realized that the simple act of handwashing with soap can save a kid from having pneumonia, asthma, and all that. Our big problem with that is that we were not scaling enough, a lot of people in places like India and Africa, people were still just washing hands with water.”
According to Kristine, it was not because they couldn’t afford a bar of soap, but because they didn’t know they needed to wash their hands.
“Washing hands is not a habit yet in some places in the world. They use utensils, turn it over and reuse it again—yes that still happens up to now—so our job was really to educate people and spread the message across. And the beauty about it is when you do that, you’re also selling. So in a way, you do well by doing good.”
Kristine and her team created a campaign called Help a Child Reach 5. It started as a challenge when their vice president uttered a very loosely given comment: “We’ve been teaching children and families to wash their hands with soap for a hundred years and we haven’t even managed to make that happen.”
So Kristine told the agency, “Sige, brainstorm lang tayo!”
“There was really no campaign at first!” she admits. “It was just a comment given in passing with no actionability around it.”
While having lunch with their agency, Kristine casually told them, “You know it would be nice if we could share our hundred-year-old story, how Lifebuoy was there in World War I and World War II, bringing these mobile vans to the war zones because some of the soldiers have not bathed for many weeks.”
The agency came up with a touching story that actually won the Cannes. And it went on to win the Effies, the Tambuli, and so many awards globally.
The story is about a father who has had many kids but none of them has survived to the age of five.
The award-winning commercial caught the attention of the whole world, including the United Nations and former U.S. President Barrack Obama.
“Our message there was clear: Handwashing saves lives. The more you use Lifebuoy, the more we will be bringing it to more communities around the world to help more children reach the age of five.”
That campaign was picked up by the United Nations and UNICEF. It was so impactful, it inspired the U.N. to update its Sustainable Development Goals to suggest washing hands, not only with water, but with soap.
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Kristine blushes with disbelief at her own achievement.
“It started with just a comment!” she says, beaming with happiness. “You dream of something and then you manage to land it. I don’t think we ever expected that coming. It was a global campaign, and during that time, we worked with markets that had to fund the campaigns. None of the markets were going to fund it because it wasn’t connected to any product that we were selling. But that was the first time that Unilever ever landed purpose.”
That campaign was so powerful, it even became viral in countries where they were not selling Lifebuoy.
It was an experience that Kristine will never forget.
“You know when you grow old, you won’t remember the metrics like by how much you grew the business or by what percent. But you’ll remember, ‘Oh, these 17 SDG goals, one of them! One of the double-clicks there is handwashing with soap!” And it all started with her comment in passing.
And that was how Lifebuoy became a pioneer of purpose at Unilever.
“Lifebuoy and Dove were one of the pioneers of that, and now every single brand is talking about purpose,” says Kristine.
PHOTO: Pau Guevarra | Esquire Philippines
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Many years after her stay in Singapore, she came home to the Philippines to work on Unilever’s Nutrition category. Knorr and Lady’s Choice are the division’s biggest brands.
“When I came home to the Philippines in 2016, they were telling me all about the brand and the campaigns they were doing, I guess I was shocked to find out that we had a 15-year-old feeding program. We are very proud of it in the company, it’s nice for Unilever Philippines to know that we are doing something for society, and that was really the most that Unilever was doing—15 years of feeding,” says Kristine.
“But in the 15 years, when I asked them, ‘How many people have you reached?’ Kasi for the Lifebuoy, our goal was one billion.”
Kristine learned the feeding program reached 650,000 people.
“Per year?” Kristine asked.
“No, cumulative,” they answered.
“Fifteen years, 650,000 cumulative reach in a population of 110 million Filipinos—I was surprised. I am proud that it has lasted that long but we need to be able to scale so we can help more people,” says Kristine.
In the Philippines, malnutrition is a leading problem: One in three kids is suffering from malnutrition. Kristine wanted to tweak the program but she didn’t know how and had no answers.
“I did a moonshot workshop—it’s similar to think big—and then we brought in agency, media, R&D, marketing, and sales to just think about how to scale that program. That was the problem I gave them. I said, ‘How do we scale up the program without necessarily bleeding the budget?’”
During the workshop, they realized that the Philippines had a socialized conditional dole out called 4Ps or the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, and someone suggested to hitch on that program.
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“And you know who came up with that? Our PR person. He said, ‘You know, our house help receives cash allowance from the government but she has to attend these learning programs.’”
“So we spoke to the DSWD and we learned that every month, they are reaching 4.5 million households—that’s households, okay, multiplied by five, that’s 20 million people—so every month, they speak to the mothers and teach them about family planning, planting, nutrition, and hygiene.
Kristine asked the DSWD if they could sponsor their nutrition program. But she wanted to understand the needs of the 4Ps beneficiaries, so she asked the DSWD what the main problems of the 4Ps consumers were.
“Bakit ba kailangan ninyong pakainin ang mga bata? Ang sagot nila, ‘Kasi kulang ang pagkain nila, kasi kulang ang pera nila, at hindi marunong magluto iyong mga nanay.’”
Kristine and her team consulted with the DOST’s Food and Nutrition Research to collaborate on recipes that would only cost P5 per meal per person.
“Recipes na P5 per meal per person per day lang—kasi iyon ang budget nila. They have a budget of P11 per person per meal, so times five mo iyon. And because a lot of the mothers are teenage mothers, they don’t know how to cook anything except fry an egg or make instant noodles.”
But the challenge was how to make the meals nutritious and delicious while keeping them very affordable.
“Gusto rin nilang nafi-feel nila na masaya ang pamilya nila dahil masarap iyong pagkain. So imagine their problems: Wala na silang pera, hindi sila marunong maglulto, and then, gusto rin nila na iisipin ng pamilya nila na ‘ako ang pinakamagaling na nanay dahil masarap ang luto ko.’”
They took on that challenge anyway and made 21-day recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It had to be 21 days because that’s how many days it takes to build a habit.
“We needed to make sure that it’s delicious, and that’s where our products come in: Knorr, Lady’s Choice. It has to be nutritious, and that’s why we have the Food and Nutrition Research Institute because they know the daily dietary allowance. At the same time, it has to be affordable. So we experimented with many recipes, and finally, we have a book!”
The Recipe Books with Meals as Affordable as P5 Per Person
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But how exactly did Kristine and her team alleviate communities of malnutrition without spending millions on feeding programs?
“We just taught them the affordable recipes, wala kaming pinapakain. With our program, we are able to reach more with the same amount of budget.
According to Kristine, feeding just 20 people for the span of six months would cost a lot.
“Kapag feeding program kasi, kailangan 3 months to 6 months, so mahal siya—but with the same amount of money that would have been spent on feeding 20 people for 6 months, we thought we could use that money to teach more mothers. On an average, the mothers would have three children, so all of a sudden we were able to scale up. We gave that recipe book to the mothers. Naging fun yung lecture because it became like a Master Chef cooking show! And then they were able to bring the recipe book at home and it doubled as a diary.”
The recipe book contains all the daily dietary allowances: it uses a lot of vegetables, it uses meats, and it uses some of Unilever’s products from Knorr and Lady’s Choice.
“I am grateful for the recognition, but at the end of the day, I cannot really second-guess what the judges think. But if there is one thing about me that I can tell you, it’s that I love bringing things, impossible things, to life—I’d like to think that the best things that my team and I have landed are the things that people think could not be done, but we made them happen.”
That allowed Unilever’s Nutrition division to leap from reaching 60,000 a year to reaching 2 million a year. The success of that program was evident. There was a 50-percent improvement in the malnourishment rate of their children.
“We measured the weights of the children before and after the program finished. We weighed them after a month, after three months, and after six months. Based on their weights, we know that they went from being malnourished to all of a sudden being normal.
But the best part was that it is sustainable: “We’re not spending on food—the moms use the recipe book themselves. So the mothers were actually empowered to take care of their families,” says Kristine.
That program was so successful, even the government adopted it for its Task Force Zero Hunger during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Kristine became their consultant.
It was such a good thing to be conceived that Unilever and Kristine had to share it with some of the biggest charity organizations in the country.
“We shared that with everyone: with Gawad Kalinga, with Project Pearls, with ABS-CBN and GMA because they also have their own campaigns. So all of the content, kami pa ang nag-train. Our brand managers trained their people. I am really passionate about this and I am pushing, so we really wanted to share it and scale it up even more.
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Today, Knorr’s Nutri-Sarap nutrition education model has been adopted by numerous NGOs and companies around the country. During her work with Pilipinas Kontra Gutom, Kristine actually helped them plot and map the parts of the country where each NGO or company would operate so the program would reach as many Filipino families as possible, and also so they don’t overlap with each other’s efforts.
Following her work on Knorr Nutri-Sarap, Kristine did something everyone thought was impossible during the pandemic: Make people buy ice cream again.
During the height of the pandemic, Kristine would be called on to helm Unilever’s ice cream division—Selecta. The brand was not growing, and the pandemic did not make things any easier for the beloved ice cream brand. It had a double-digit growth some five years back, but for some reason, Filipinos have stopped buying more of their favorite treat.
And then 2020 happened. The Philippines, an ice cream-loving nation, suddenly had no reason or access to buy ice cream. There was no footfall in the stores.
People had lost their jobs, everyone was stuck at home, and were scared to go to the grocery. And when they did, it was all in a hurry to buy only the essential things. So how do you sell ice cream—a non-essential—to people who used to buy it on impulse whenever they go out? It was a problem that Kristine had to solve.
“Pagpasok ko in 2021, and we were still declining. Honestly, nakialam ako on everything. I wanted to touch sales first, I told them, okay, last year in 2020, you declined. But that happened because we lost distribution. Some of the sari-sari stores that we would reach closed down. I told them, ‘You need to look for new ones because there are also sari-sari stores that opened.’ Spread out distribution talaga. I gave them a target to hit per month, and I split it up city by city. I made sure to break it down into small cities so each group has a target that I am able to track once a month,” Kristine recalls.
But the most impactful strategy was actually Happinas—ice cream is all about happiness.
"During the time when we were all stuck at home, we were not very happy because we were not able to see our loved ones, we couldn’t go out, and so many things. We thought, if ice cream is equal to happiness, and all I need to do is get ice cream to you, then hopefully, you’ll be happy. The big insight there is just because we are physically distant does not mean we should be socially apart," Kristine says.
So she tells the team, "What if we brought ice cream to every single house?" The question was how.
During that time, Kristine met with Grab’s country manager. “Selecta is happiness, and if Grab is all about connecting people and reaching out to people, can we use Grab and all our logistics partners to deliver ice cream from one end to another?” Kristine told Grab.
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“I haven’t visited my parents in three years, can I get an over to them so that they know that I’m still thinking about them and, you know, make them happy?
“I told them a story about a flight attendant who lost their job during the pandemic and started selling fishballs on the street. That inspired me. I said, what if we had a comedian who actually lost his job because everything was closed, and then naging Grab driver siya? Now, his purpose is to spread happiness in a different way. Noon, he spreads happiness by telling jokes. Right now, he’s spreading happiness by connecting one family to another through ice cream.”
Grab loved the idea. It was an unusual meeting for Kristine because she seldom goes to joint business planning with retailers. It was a partnership that was meant to happen because Selecta had pickup points everywhere, and Grab could provide the logistics to deliver them anywhere.
The pitch was so good, it spread quickly. All the major retailers, convenience stores, and malls heard about it. “They came to us and said, what about us? They wanted to partner with us too!” But it would be costly, so Kristine had to hatch up a plan.
“We were supposed to do a global campaign about some feel-good story about an influencer who went to a village sharing happiness. But I was like, how do you shoot something like that in the pandemic? And the Philippines had the longest lockdown in the world!”
She realigned the budget for that campaign to launch Happinas.
“We made it a really, really, big happiness campaign, and we called it Happinas, from Pilipinas and happiness. We made it very ownable, it was supposed to be just a weekend or international ice cream day which was set in July.”
That weekend campaign became a two-month campaign because Grab did not want to stop it, the stores did not want to stop it, and the retailers wanted it to continue. Suddenly, ice cream sales around the country was so successful, Selecta started giving away ice cream at community pantries nationwide. It was an unbelievable turnaround in a span of less than a year.
“In a span of two months during that quarter, it was a rainy season in the Philippines. Historically, a weak quarter for the ice cream category. We grew double-digit in that one quarter alone, and that was one of the most successful ones,” Kristine shares. “That campaign won a lot of awards,” she adds.
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Now, Unilever’s ice cream category is back to a strong growth from a challenging year prior to the Happinas campaign.
Everyone was happy.
‘You do well in business by doing good.’
Looking back on the three impactful campaigns that made impossible things happen, Kristine simply says they were just trying to do good.
“You do well in business by doing good. Sometimes, you don’t need a lot of campaigns, you just need a few but you need those few to be really, really impactful. And sometimes it just starts as a vision, as a dream, and you just need to make sure that you follow through, otherwise, it will just remain that way. The happiness I get from landing these impossible campaigns is seeing how it’s impacted people’s lives—getting more children to live beyond 5 years or seeing them eat nutritious meals, or simply making people smile—that’s what gets me excited about the work I do.”
Kristine pauses and smiles.
“My goals were very simple. I didn’t set out to make Selecta Philippines the biggest business in Southeast Asia or make Foods Philippines the biggest category in the country. For me, I just want to do my job. I hope that in the process of doing that job, I am able to also bring people along on that journey and I am able to create impact.” she adds.
But how does Kristine live with the fact that the decisions she makes actually impact the whole world?
“Now that you’re asking me that, it feels scary that that much weight is on my shoulders, but I really don’t think about that," Kristine says.
Throughout her journey, is there any profound experience that she will never forget?
“More than the experiences, I see people’s faces. I remember the people who were with me on that journey, and I am happy to see that they are all successful right now and they are doing good, and I hope they remember that we actually did things together.
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