Unilever has embarked on an extensive social media campaign throughout Asia to promote brands like Pond’s and Lux to Asian women:

After weighing the costs of an ad blitz in traditional media, Unilever opted for a stealthy digital campaign to generate buzz, establish the product’s credibility and encourage Chinese women to give Pond’s Age Miracle a try.

via Marketing: Unilever Dips Into Social Media in Asia – Global News – Advertising Age.

With such a sizeable online population in China (Netpop estimates that over 40 million Chinese use social media heavily), Unilever was taking a big risk. They reached out to testers on popular Chinese beauty blogs and waited for the results, knowing (as with all social media) that negative feedback could have a quick and decisive impact on the brand. All this in a market where Pond’s was competing against other global brands like Procter & Gamble’s Olay, as well as L’Oreal, and Clinique.

Unilever’s strategy paid off: Pond’s Age Miracle cream became a big hit, drawing attention from other Unilever offices around Asia. In several of these other Asian countries, Unilever has effectively leveraged social media like Facebook fan pages and YouTube to its advantage—this was reportedly their first social media campaign in China. With some social media marketing already under way, Unilever seems primed to develop successful social media campaigns to reach women in other parts of Asia.

But is Unilever open to leveraging social media to reach multicultural women—women of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American descent—here in the United States? Women of color are now 30% of the U.S. female population and spent $1 trillion in 2008. Rather than define women generally for major product rollouts, consumer product companies like Unilever might increase their brand awareness and loyalty by making a relatively small investment into social media campaigns that target multicultural women.