Dove Real Beauty Campaign

It has been decades since the media has portrayed the idea of real beauty as something completely fabricated. May it be a woman in a TVC or a picture in the magazine, the media chooses to showcase airbrushed women with perfect skin, slim bodies and amazing height to feature. These things create unrealistic expectations of beauty.

One single brand that has stood up to fight against these fake beauty standards has been “DOVE”. With Dove’s real beauty campaign launched in 2004 they’ve tried to tell people that beauty is to be associated with confidence and not anxiety.

Marketing insight for dove: A study was conducted in 10 countries across the globe, and 3000 women were asked if they found themselves beautiful. The result was surprising. Only 2% of women could define themselves as beautiful. Every woman seemed to have a problem with her physical appearance and was conscious about the way she looked. Dove saw this as an opportunity. Dove was trying to change its branding before it introduced its range of new beauty products like body wash and shampoo.

The main aim of this campaign was to celebrate the unique features and differences of every women. The physical appearance should be a sign of confidence for women and not anxiety. Dove with its real beauty campaign was widened the definition of beauty. The company has been successful to change people’s attitudes and perception of “real beauty”.

Also, with this campaign Dove changed the usual advertising practice of featuring slim, tall and fair women. They called real women to feature in this campaign. Women of all shapes, sizes and colours but yet beautiful. They spread the message that, “Real beauty cannot be stereotyped and every woman needs to embrace her beauty! Beauty needs to make one confident and not anxious.”

The campaign’s success could be measured by the tremendous publicity it has received. It can be the 9.5 Million Youtube views on its commercials or maybe the numerous awards the campaign bagged.

Here are some of the campaigns of Dove that have grabbed millions of eye balls-

Dove Evolution campaign for Real Beauty

This campaign is a part of the Real Beauty campaign and was launched in 2006. This campaign shows how models enhance their physical appearance with make-up and hair styles. Even after a photoshoot, the best photo is chosen out of the lot and after heavy editing the physical characteristics like height, curves of the body and skin tone are modified and then the photo is published stereotyping the standards of beauty. The video ends with the statement “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”. The film ends and an invitation is shown to take part in the “dove real beauty workshops”. The logo for dove self-esteem funds is also released. The campaign has won number of awards like the Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards and an Epica D’Or award. Also, much of the campaign’s success can be attributed to it being the first digital campaign to drive participants to a supportive online community that reached over 200 million people worldwide, with over 26 million people participating in the campaign online.

Dove Real Beauty- Sketches Campaign "You're more beautiful than you think"

This campaign was another effect campaign that has been thought provoking and has grabbed attention of people everywhere! The campaign was released in 2013, and it aimed at telling people that women are their own critics and they are much more beautiful then what they think they are. The video featured various women describing themselves to a forensic sketch artist and phrases like “round chubby face”, “my mom says I have a big jaw” were used. Another sketch of the same women was made but this time unknown people described these women and the results were surprising. The description of unknown people just proved that the women were way more beautiful then what they actually thought they were! The video went viral and more that 15 Million people downloaded the film within a week.

Major fail for the campaign-

Every coin has two sides and with positives do come the negatives!

• By many customers Dove is viewed as a hypocritical brand. On one hand it tells people to be happy in their own skin, on the other hand they sell skin-firming and skin-glowing soaps. This creates cognitive dissonance amongst customers.

• The parent company of Dove is Unilever and Unilever is also having brands like Fair and Lovely and Axe under its roof. The marketing communication for fair and lovely is completely contradicting that of Dove. Dove celebrated beauty in every form whereas Fair and Lovely targets Dark-skinned tones and emphasises that Fair is pretty.

Hence, people might think that this is a move by Unilever to improve it’s brand image and that their main goal would be to boost profits for Dove.