Analysis Of Advertisements By Dove's 'Campaign For Real Beauty'

2200 Words9 Pages
1 Introduction
Advertisements have a great impact on people but they are not representing reality. Companies try to promote their product the best they can in order to increase revenue. To do so, they and appeal to and satisfy the needs and longings of potential customers. Dove® , being a Unilever brand, tried a considerably different approach to draw attention to itself.
Therefore, his term paper aims to analyze advertisements by Dove semiotically as well as to compare them, especially focusing on the depiction of women and how it changed with the launch of Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.
Since print advertisements are the cultural material being used in this paper, the analysis will be from the author’s point of view. Nevertheless, it will be based on and supported by methods of semiotic analysis. Also some aspects of gender theory, especially stereotypical beliefs, are taken into account.
Unilever’s personal care brand Dove was chosen since it was the first to show women in advertisements as they were. Their posters and TV commercials challenge stereotypes and draw attention to the distorted idea of how a woman has to look like. A small selection of former and recent advertisements were chosen to show the development in the brand’s marketing strategies. Since the focus of this paper will be on the representation of women, only advertisements including women are to be analyzed but still they are assumed to be characteristic of the brand’s advertising during that