Unilever’s Tinkering With Marketing Spending Boosts 2nd Q Profits

Unilever’s second quarter financials mostly beat Wall Street expectations – sales growth fell three percent short – but the rise in profit came from cuts in marketing expenses. In April the company said about $2.3 billion of its planned three-year $7 billion cost-cutting program would come from marketing and overhead. During the first half of this fiscal year, however, nearly a third of the cuts came only from marketing; half were attributable to both marketing and overhead. The company is cutting ad agency and production spending, but marketing spending overall will rebound in the second half when 60 percent of Unilever's new-product launches for the year will take place. [Image Credit: © Unilever ]