Dove’s Campaign for real beauty

 
 

In 2003, Dove set out to make beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety, for women. Fifteen years later, millions of beauty insecurities have been dispelled and billions of dollars have been added to the company’s brand value. Dove’s campaign revolutionized the beauty industry and made Dove the most meaningful beauty brand in the world, but the battle is far from won. As new beauty anxieties appear, Dove continues to pursue its bold vision for change.

During its first 35 years the Dove brand represented a bar of soap. It was known as a cleansing brand, one that had an aging profile and generic brand image. In 2003 Unilever decided to pivot Dove toward a much faster-growing and higher-margin beauty category. To thrive, however, Dove needed a point of view on beauty that was disruptive and challenged the status quo. Dove wasn’t the first brand to realize that there was something severely wrong with the beauty industry — which was predicated on making women feel bad about themselves — but it was the first brand to frame the issue clearly to the general public as well as wholeheartedly dedicate itself to fixing the problem.

2003: Beauty Industry Stereotypes

Dove commissioned a study in 2003, “The Real Truth About Beauty,” which uncovered key insights about women globally:

  • 57 percent believe that the attributes of female beauty have become very narrowly defined.

  • 68 percent believe that media and advertising set an unrealistic and unachievable standard of beauty.

  • 72 percent feel worse about themselves after reading a women’s magazine.

Dove concluded that the beauty industry was shaming millions of women, and it set out to do something about it. The statistic that ignited and sparked its campaign idea was that globally, only 2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful. Dove aimed to create a different world, one where beauty could be a source of confidence for women and not a source of anxiety. This vision transformed into an idea, and Dove created the “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which wasn’t a traditional advertising campaign but rather a social protest with a goal of achieving real societal change.

Although more common today, this idea was revolutionary in marketing 16 years ago, and an entirely different approach. Dove set out to tackle the enemies that stood in the way of its vision: the stereotypes that the beauty industry was peddling, and the narrow, unrealistic, and unachievable version of beauty in magazines.

First, Dove launched its new product, a firming lotion, with communications which featured women of different sizes, shapes, and skin tones in mainstream beauty advertising.

The second piece of communication was large, provocative billboards around the world, in prominent locations, which featured a “tick box,” with the objective of launching and getting people to participate in a debate about beauty and culture. Dove invited people to participate by commenting on what beauty could be and what they found beautiful via their mobile phones. Its goal was to bring debate into the public domain.

The third element of its campaign was the launch of the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which was also revolutionary at the time. Dove had set out from its onset to be a brand that doesn’t just talk about real beauty, but one that takes steps to obtain real beauty. The Self-Esteem Project went beyond communications and is to this day the world’s largest educational self-esteem project, with workshops in schools among 11- to 13-year-old girls who are most at risk. The project teaches girls about body positivity and self-acceptance. The program has thus far reached 40 million girls through classroom workshops as well as several hundred million girls through downloaded materials.

The project caught the public’s attention and inspired a large number of comments in newspapers, magazines, and TV shows. Celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey even jumped in organically. The project generated 650 million media impressions and is valued at about 150 percent of the actual paid media budget. In its first year, Dove saw a 24 percent increase in sales with a 3:1 ROI, and won its first Grand Effie at the U.S. Effie Awards.

2006: Beauty Industry Deceit

Dove developed a film, Evolution, to tackle a new enemy and open women’s eyes to the manipulations that distort their image of beauty. It revealed all the Photoshopping, makeup, hair styling, and so on that occurs behind an image to reveal why the perception of beauty is distorted. The film became a huge viral success with 21 million hits online, which at the time made it the largest ever online branded video. It won two Grand Prix prizes at Cannes and generated an estimated value of $150 million from publicity and coverage; the film only cost $100,000 to make.

2012: Social Media

By 2012 new sources of beauty anxiety were arising in places that hadn’t existed when the Campaign for Real Beauty launched. Social media had arrived and was accounting for a large share of women’s media usage, while Facebook advertisers were more nefarious than magazines had been at touting a perfect image of beauty. The Facebook algorithm could use women’s social data against them to activate their own insecurities. For instance, if a woman posted a photo from vacation and tagged it with “bikini,” she would be served ads for weight loss, breast enhancement, plastic surgery, liposuction, etc.

Dove’s idea was to give these ads a makeover of their own, and it created the “Dove Ad Makeover” campaign. It allowed women to create their own supportive body positive messages to create ads in the Facebook app to send their friends, while Unilever made sure that these positive ads outbid any of the other advertisers and negative ads previously served. In just two weeks, 171 million pieces of potentially damaging negative imagery were replaced with body-positive imagery.

2013: The Inner Critic

In 2013, “real” was everywhere in beauty. It was in magazines, campaigns, editorial, and so forth. Celebrities were complaining about Photoshopping, while others refused to work with magazine which Photoshopped.

Dove’s job wasn’t done, however, and it realized that its vision for beauty to be a source of confidence was a long way from being realized. It conducted another global study in 2013, “The Real Truth About Beauty, Revisited,” and discovered that pressure from the media had lessened: only 6 percent of women said that they felt less pressure from the media to be beautiful. However, the pressure hadn’t gone away. The enemy had instead been internalized: 32 percent of women globally admitted that “the pressure I put on myself to be beautiful is my biggest source of anxiety,” and 54 percent of women said that when it comes to how they look, they are their own worst beauty critic.

Dove identified its next enemy as the inner critic that tells women they’re not beautiful. Dove needed a new expression of its idea about the inner critic, and it quietly pivoted toward its new idea: “You are more beautiful than you think.” The idea led to Dove’s most famous campaign yet: “Beauty Sketches.” In 10 days, the film had been viewed 13 million times online and broke its own record for most viewed online video. It had a 4:1 ROI, which won Dove its second Effie Grand Prix and the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes. The 30-second Beauty Sketches spot was watched more than a billion times, or the equivalent of one thousand years.

Recent Years

Dove has continued to evolve. Recent communications focus less on women’s internal dialogue and beauty insecurity. Dove has adopted a positive and confident approach to beauty that matches how culture has changed and the rise of women’s’ empowerment — not just in beauty, but far beyond it.

Over the course of the Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove’s rise has been incredible. Dove’s brand value has increased by 267 percent over the decade, more than any other beauty brand in the world as well as four times more than its nearest competitor at a similar price point. Dove’s sales value increased over the 10-year period by an almost identical percentage, resulting in a more than 250 percent rise in brand value and dollar sales value.

Dove’s Key Steps to Success

There were three factors that contributed to the success of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

  1. Be meaningfully different.
    There are three key measures that drive brand value, according to Miller Brown: meaning, difference, and salience. Brands that score highly on those measures grow about six times faster than other brands. Dove excels at all three measures, but particularly on the meaning score as the most meaningful beauty brand in the world. The revenue driven purely by Dove’s brand association is estimated at over half a billion dollars a year.

  2. Give the master brand room to do its job.
    Dove has a communications model that makes a distinction between the role of master brand and the role of products. Although it spends most of its marketing budget on product advertising when it does master brand advertising, its role is to put forward Dove’s point of view and make it more culturally relevant and increase emotional affinity. When Dove decided back in 2008 that master brand advertising was an unaffordable luxury, it devoted all its funds toward product advertising. Nielson’s economic metric analysis proved that the opposite was the case: master brand advertising leads to profits and has an ROI of about $4.42 of every dollar spent, or three times the CPG average. Knowing the ROI of the master brand grants incredible creative freedom.

  3. Master earned media.
    Every brand wants to master earned media and wants free unpaid publicity, but very few brands have managed to capture it on the transformational scale that Dove has. The earned media budget at Dove has always exceeded its paid budget.

Key Lessons

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty dispelled millions of beauty insecurities and added billions to Unilever’s bottom line and Dove’s brand value. The brand touched consumers, affected culture, changed the beauty industry for the better, and made Dove the most meaningful beauty brand in the world. Although the battle is far from won in Dove’s eyes, new beauty insecurities continue to rise and Dove will continue to adapt and persist, pursuing its bold vision for change.

Dove shared five key lessons from its Campaign for Real Beauty that can be applied more broadly to other businesses and brands.

  1. Having a genuine purpose delivers financial as well as societal returns.
    Unilever’s old CEO used to say that the best way to have a healthy business is to have a healthy society. Dove is one of Unilever’s 26 sustainable living brands or brands that have a societal purpose and business purpose, and are growing 46 percent faster than other Unilever brands. Brands today should be ambitious and set sights high to change the world while remaining rooted in the brand’s product and thinking about how that product could be part of a vision that improves peoples lives.

  2. Open peoples’ hearts to what they already know.
    A brand such as Dove has multiple geographies, complexities, product categories, etc. It would be easy to chase new insights and dig deeper for new, more obscure insight, but it’s important not to walk past the obvious category truths. Dove’s campaign has been based on this notion. It wasn’t the first brand to discover what was going on in the beauty industry but it was the first to frame it and go after it.

  3. Trust is everything.
    A brand without trust is just a product. Dove has been meticulous in earning trust over the years through extreme honesty in its communications. It goes much beyond hiring real women and portraying a diversity of body types and skin colors. Dove has rejected retouching of images and has never published a retouched image in its entire history of the Campaign for Real Beauty. It has established integrity and honesty in its communications and thereby built trust.

  4. Do everything with passion because you never know which part will fly.
    The film Evolution was something of an accident. Dove’s big film that same year (2006) was its Super Bowl commercial, “Little Girls.” Evolution came from a small brief to do a promo for the Dove Self-Esteem workshops but it caught the public’s attention and overshadowed the Super Bowl ad. If people are passionate about purpose and give the same attention to a promo ad for a workshop as they do to a Super Bowl ad, chances of success multiply.

  5. Stick at it.
    Brands often abandon successful campaigns much too quickly in the rush to move on to something new and exciting. Dove could have done this at a number of stages, such as a decade ago when real women were portrayed everywhere. It also could have done so in 2007 after Evolution. But it didn’t. It takes great tenacity and courage to stick with something rather than move away from it. Brands must adapt, but persist.

    "Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty." Brian McCarter, Chief Strategy

    Officer at Ogilvy EMEA. 2020 ANA Brand Masters Conference, 3/5/20.