Unilever's "Real Beauty" Campaign for Dove

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

In “The Fashion Industry: Free to be an Individual” by Hannah Berry, Hannah emphasizes how social media especially advertisements pressure females to use certain product to in order to be considered beautiful. She also acknowledges the current effort of advertisement today to more realistically depicts of women. In addition, these advertisements use the modern women look to advertise products to increase women self-esteem and to encourage women to be comfortable with one’s image.

For centuries, women have found it to be difficult to live up and be the standard “runaway model”. Women have the pressure to fit in to be considered beautiful since ads and media have distorted society in how they view and evaluate beauty. The false representation of models in the beauty commercials have made women want to replicate them even though they don’t know what’s behind the editing. Even though this is a huge matter, companies did not stand back but instead made more commercials that self-degrade women constantly, except one. The Dove Evolution Commercial- “Campaign for Real Beauty” focuses on the way they change women sending a strong message to women about beauty and what it really

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

In addition, advertising feeds from mob mentality, convincing people a product will change their lives by deeming it fashionable or sophisticated. It bypasses logical thinking to take control of how people view themselves and their “need for esteem. People want and need to be respected and we need to feel good about ourselves. And this is where much advertising lives, often because we are selling products that people really do not need. L’Oreal’s ‘Because you’re worth it’ is the perfect example” (Madigan 83). For this reason, expectations of a person are manipulated to fit the wants of the industry to sell products. These people are affected since they feel as if they have no choice in what to wear, how their body should appear to others, and which brands they buy. It all comes down to the need to be apart of something bigger, instead of sticking out from the crowd.

Not only was Dove’s new campaign ridiculed for the voluptuous women they had focused their attention on, they were also being targeted for health concerns. Pozner addresses Bill Zwecker, the balding, paunchy, middle-aged anchor of CBS's local newscast in Chicago, weighed in on his CBS blog, At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, In this day and age, when we are facing a huge obesity problem in this country, we don't need to encourage anyone -- women OR men -- to think it's okay to be out of shape." (Pozner, 216). Pozner believes this statement would be more believable if the women on the billboard were unhealthily obese. However, the women in the advertisement were actually smaller than the average sized American woman.

The adventure of becoming a successful brand with the launch of Cream Bar in the United States begins in 1957. Dove is Unilever's fastest growing and momentum as time goes on after this launch is one of the brands. World launch of Dove is started in 1991. The brand went to meet with consumers in 55 countries in total by the end of 1994. Thus, the Dove family kept expanding. Successive face and body cleansing products, skin care, deodorant and hair care products with the launch of Dove continued to grow rapidly. Today, Dove, and the difference in quality that will redefine the standards of the category that enters through any personal care, personal hygiene brand to the world's expert.

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.

The Dove campaign for Real Beauty was the brainchild of Ogilvy & Mathers, Edelman Public Relations and Harbinger Communications (to be referred to as simply Ogilvy) and the project was known as the “Evolution” campaign. The marketing campaign began in 2004 under the corporation known as Unilever. This diversified conglomerate is the parent company to the Dove Company’s line of beauty and body products. The campaign began as a result of survey conducted in which only 2% of women believed they were “beautiful.” Unilever saw an opportunity to reach a saturated market from a fresh perspective. After hiring Ogilvy, the message grew into one of the most successful advertising campaigns in Unilever’s storied history.

Dove was developed in the United States as a non-irritating skin cleaner for pre-treatment use on burns and wounds during World War II. In 1957, Dove bar reformulated as a beauty soap bar. In 1970s, the company launched promotional campaign for shop’s mildness as found in the study that Dove to be milder than 17 leading bar soaps. Through the years, Dove has expanded its product line to body wash, facial cleansers, moisturizers, deodorants and hair care products. In 2005, Unilever’s Dove product line revenue reached $3 billion. However, even though these events make Dove appear as a flawless brand, both Dove’s sales and market share were dwindling and the competition remains on the rise. Thus, under the management of

Kerstin Dunleavy needs to determine how to maintain the Dove brand’s momentum. The key objectives and goals of the Dove product line is to increase market share, develop a strong marketing campaign, retain functional strengths of the brand,

Many young women in today’s society struggle with confidence and their body image. This is a huge problem in society and many people have spoken out against the influence of media on women’s body image. However, it continues to be a major problem and more can always be done to raise awareness about societies unrealistic expectations for women’s beauty. Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign was started to promote the self-esteem of women and encourage them to see their beauty, however there are some criticisms, including the company using this campaign to increase their sales. Dove is selling a product with the expectation that confident, beautiful women will purchase it, however people still have the ability to resist the ad industry.