Unilever: Fair & Lovely Scholarship Programme

Sponsoring scholarships for girls is common practice among beauty brands in Myanmar, which makes it hard for any one brand to be remembered for it. Unilever wanted Fair & Lovely to own the territory, not simply take part. Every competitor talked about the same things: the amount of money, the universities the girls could reach, the courses on offer. A different proposition was needed if the programme was to stand for something the others did not.

Ruder Finn Era proposed a different narrative. The scholarship winners were about to make two transitions at once, from school to university and from their villages to the big city, and nobody was equipping them morally and emotionally for either. That gap became the programme's proposition.

The Fair & Lovely scholarship was launched as a programme that accounted not only for education but for life: educational coaching and psychological support for all the winners alongside the funding. The launch event and KOL activity communicated that difference, positioning the brand as the one that cared about the young women rather than the headline sum.