unilever's real beauty campaign for dove

Subject Name: Strategic MarketingStudent Name: Ritu GirotraEnrollment Number: 6010091104133

UNILEVER'S REAL BEAUTY CAMPAIGN FOR DOVE (MKTG 155)

Q.1) Critically analyze the factors that resulted in the success of the Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty”. Do you think that Unilever can sustain this campaign over the long term without being considered as a brand for “Fat Women”, as suggested by a few critics?

A.1) In order to stand out from the competition, Dove aimed to start a dialogue with its consumers about how beauty is and should be defined. The advertising needed to provoke debate, not necessarily be agreed with but definitely be talked about. Dove also needed to establish an emotional connection with women, adding the priceless ‘feel good’ factor to its brand image. According to its mission statement, “Dove’s mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by broadening the narrow definition of beauty and inspiring them to take great care of themselves.” An integrated marketing communications campaign was built on this philosophy. Dove carefully crafted a highly visible brand image of itself with this campaign. They showed how progressive they can be by speaking up against impossible standards and suggesting that one should reject the current standard by which beauty is defined. They are boldly sending a message that everyone, no matter their age or appearance, is truly beautiful. This allowed Dove to be seen as a company that placed importance on how people are feeling and less on trying to push a product onto consumers. Their ads were meant to trigger emotional responses from viewers.

Imagine someone who has been struggling all their life with self-image issues because they are curvy, wear glasses or have freckles. When they look at magazines, television and billboards they never see themselves and begin have self-esteem issues. Then one day they see Dove ads with women that look just like everybody else on the street and not some high-gloss model and think “Wow, now here’s a company that caters to the everyday woman”. This may lead them to associate positive, happy feelings when they see these ads or Dove products.

Strengths of the Campaign

Since the message that Dove wants to get across is that you are beautiful no matter what you look like, the ad works in many ways.

First, it appeals to people’s rational, not just their emotions. While many consciously know that the standard of beauty is warped, they nevertheless choose to believe in it, rarely publically stating that it is wrong. Dove, however, speaks out against those standards in their ads, showing that appealing to rational is just as important as creating an emotional response.

Second, the ads engage you emotionally because they address people’s self-esteem issues. They are showing that they care about how you feel and ensure that you have a positive view of

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yourself and that your attitude towards beauty is one that you define and not one that has been defined for you.

Third, the ads promote a strong sense of social awareness and good values because they are letting you know you should be standing up for something that is inherently wrong. Foregoing the supermodel and celebrity spokesperson and using diversity in the models shows that they are care about everyone and are not just focused on selling a product with a pretty face.

Fourth, the ads are provocative. They make you stop and think. Despite the use of a minimal amount of text, the message gets across. It’s also a message you are not likely to forget the second you turn the page or channel. It is used as a vehicle to begin a more in-depth discussion about beauty.

Last, there is a lot more to the advertisement. It is not merely an ad but an entire campaign that includes self-esteem programs, literature and discussions on their website. For Dove, it wasn’t enough to just put an ad out there; they made sure that they backed up what they were saying by having more to offer than just an ad. They want to make sure people started talking about beauty in a new way and invited them to comment on their website as well as created online open discussions on the subject

Improvement Areas

The Campaign for Real Beauty is quite affective in getting a positive message out to the public; however, they also have several shortcomings. Despite the fact that their message seems clear it fails to be direct enough. It carries excess baggage and can be considered ambiguous at best.

For example, on one of their billboards, portraying the curvy woman, people were encouraged to phone in and vote on whether the woman was fat or fab. The votes for Fat eventually outnumbered the votes for fab. This proves that despite their best efforts to portray that woman as fabulous, people’s beliefs still lie in the outdated standards, proving that attitudes have yet to change.

Another argument can be made concerning the models themselves. While Dove chose to stay away from “professional” models, they also clearly chose models that are still pretty. Even the curvy woman, has relatively few curves, the dress fits her perfectly and it appears she has no belly fat whatsoever. These women are as over-processed as any other model, in fact many belief that they are subject to digital retouching and airbrushing in order for them appear this way.

Conclusion

In September 2006, Landor Associates identified Dove as one of 10 brands with the greatest percentage gain in brand health and business value in the past three years.3 It computed that

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the brand had grown by $1.2 billion. Much of the growth was attributable to its extension into new personal care categories, and exactly how much could be credited to “The Campaign for Real Beauty” was not a question anyone had evidence to answer. What was clear, however, was that the campaign had touched a nerve with the public. Thousands of blogs and Internet chat forums showed a rich diversity of public dialog. There were declarations by fathers to daughters on themes like self- esteem, and there were endorsements of Dove’s stand against stereotypes of beauty.

However, Dove also received some amount of criticism in the press and the blogosphere as certain viewers identified it as the brand for fat girls. Mostly Unilever was accused of disingenuousness, when consumers realized that it was also the parent company for Axe, a brand that capitalizes on stereotypical images of women to sell product. The voluptuous, size two Axe models hardly fit in with Dove’s campaign for “real” beauty.

Alicia Clegg, blogging on Brandchannel.com, summed up her view of the Dove strategy as follows:

Taking up the cudgels for reality is a risky strategy for Dove. The underlying idea is appealing; the difficulty is in how to express it. When Dove ran its Masterbrand advertising, it was criticized by some for choosing unrepresentative “real” women—a 96-year-old, described by one marketer as: “the old lady equivalent of a super-model”; a heavily freckled, but enviably cute, 22- year-old, and so on. The latest campaign has a harder edge, tipping the balance away from aspiration toward realism. It may be more honest, but does its honesty leave women enough freedom to dream?”

Seth Stevenson, a columnist for the popular online magazine Slate, went further: “Talk about real beauty all you want—once you’re the brand for fat girls, you’re toast.

However, from a brand perspective, the positive aspects far outweighed the critical commentary about the campaign. The brand did run the risk of being labeled as the brand for fat girls or a mediocre beauty brand, but given the brain and money power put behind the campaign and the ability of Unilever to fine tune and augment their Real Beauty campaign based on market feedback and response, I am confident that Unilever will be able to sustain this positioning long enough to reap the planned benefits.

[The same is evident in the fact that today 8 years after the launch, the theme behind the original campaign still is core to the marketing efforts of Unilever’s Beauty line of products e.g. Movement for Self-esteem in 2010 & The Real Truth About Beauty: Revisited in 2011]

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Q.2) Examine whether Dove’s Real Beauty campaign satisfies the definition of Integrated Marketing Communications. What else could the company have done to make the campaign more effective?

A.2) Marketing communications is a management process through which an organization engages with its various audiences. Through understanding an audience's communications environment, organizations seek to develop and present messages for their identified stakeholder groups, before evaluating and acting upon the responses. By conveying messages that are of significant value, audiences are encouraged to offer attitudinal and behavioral responses"

In the case of Dove, the core theme of the campaign was to inform the target audience about Dove's philosophy of beauty, which is, "beauty comes in different shapes, sizes and colors". The philosophy is aimed at touching a nerve in females of all age groups and is in stark contrast with the popular culture which bombards us with unrealistic images of physical perfection.

The "Campaign for Real Beauty" is a textbook example of how an integrated marketing campaign can take a nearly obsolete brand to "one of 10 brands with greatest percentage gain in brand health and business value in the past three years." The well thought-out flexible plan was implemented in such a way that they could take advantage of the necessary marketing tools as they presented themselves.

Contrary to the huge traditional marketing launches that focused primarily on mass media, the "Campaign for Real Beauty" used interactive billboards to draw attention to the new face of "real beauty." This calculated approach was not made because Unilever had a limited marketing budget, rather they wanted to tap into consumer sentiment and receive automatic reaction to the campaign. The voting process provided measurable "real time" feedback on whether the proposed campaign drew enough public attention to move forward.

The overwhelming interest in the "Campaign for Real Beauty" had legs and brought the Dove brand name back into the minds and conversations of consumers and brand analyst alike.

Despite the occasional usage of traditional magazine and television advertising mediums, Unilever fully employed integrative marketing communication techniques to reach as many "touch points" as possible. The shifting of social norms, which Dove's marketing team claimed to be at the heart of the campaign, needed wide-spread, repetitive and consistent messaging in order to be successful. A television advertisement that addressed the "self esteem challenges" of young girls aired during the 2006 Super Bowl.

To some analysts the Super Bowl seemed to be a strange way to pinpoint their female target. However, if the intended social change necessitated a mass audience, what better way to do that than through an advertisement which could potentially reach 9 million touch points. Not only that but, Super Bowl ads lend themselves to a subsequent barrage of analysis by the media, which equated to invaluable P.R. The integration went far beyond what Dove's branding mangers expected at the corporate level and even further than they expected at consumer level.

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Consumers, commentators, comedians, news anchors and even Oprah joined the conversation surrounding the self-esteem platform. Unilever wanted information to disseminate throughout internal and external audiences, a tactic at the heart of integrative marketing communications, and they were clearly successful.

The social implications inherent in the "real beauty" message lent itself directly to various non-traditional marketing tools. Dove's brand development team created a solid message that worked on a global scale and provided a foundation that could be articulated and integrated into local markets at the brand building level. Dove's "real beauty" platform had the mission to make more women realize their beauty in a "celebratory, inclusive, and democratic way." The democratic nature was embodied in the unique integrative marketing tools that regional markets utilized. From self-esteem workshops, Girl Scout sponsorships, You Tube videos, to ad creation competitions, Unilever had a finger on the pulse of the general public and allowed them to shape the social dialogue. This emotional and often controversial dialogue pervaded all media outlets and allowed Dove's "real beauty" campaign to connect with a diverse and massive audience.

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unilever's real beauty campaign for dove

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