• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer, December 19, 2025

Unilever’s top marketer is leaving the company as the CPG giant continues its transformation to consolidate and amplify growth efforts. Esi Eggleston Bracey, the chief growth and marketing officer who has led the company’s marketing for the past eight years, is departing. Leandro Barreto, currently CMO for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing division, will add responsibility for the company’s entire marketing efforts.

The moves come as part of a sweeping makeover effort under Fernando Fernandez, who took over as CEO in March. With the recent spinoff of the company’s ice cream division, the conglomerate now operates four relatively equal-sized business groups: beauty and well-being, which includes Dove; personal care, with brands such as Axe and Vaseline; home care, spanning detergents and cleaners; and foods, ranging from Hellmann’s Mayonnaise to Liquid I.V.

Fernandez’s agenda is already taking hold and delivering improved results, “sharpening market execution and driving larger, more differentiated innovations to enhance the appeal of Unilever’s brands in increasingly fragmented markets,” wrote Diana Radu, an analyst at Morningstar.

The previous strategy “granted more autonomy in product development to regional management, which resulted in excessive complexity and market share losses in many categories,” she wrote. The newer approach, with the four business groups assuming full responsibility for both sales and profits, “should ensure more consistent brand communication and execution, as well as scaled innovation for the company’s 30 most important brands.”

In the announcement, Fernandez credited Bracey with “delivering a step-change in performance and helping lay the foundations for breakthrough growth momentum… redefining how Unilever builds demand globally.” He added that Barreto will be tasked with turning Unilever “into a true marketing and sales machine.”

Among Bracey’s most significant accomplishments at Unilever: Doubling the growth rate at Dove to help build it into a $2 billion brand, and spearheading the CROWN Act, designed to protect people from race-based hair discrimination. That legislation has now been adopted in 30 states and is widely recognized as one of the industry’s most transformative efforts.

In a LinkedIn post announcing her departure, Bracey called her work with Unilever’s U.S. sales team “a career highlight… None of it was marketing for marketing’s sake. It was about connecting creativity to performance, and brands to culture.”

After more than 30 years in marketing, including 25 years at Procter & Gamble, she said she is looking forward to “some much-needed rest — the kind every corporate athlete benefits from.”