The Dove Campaign

As Kate Cox (2011) states, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that integrated campaigns are more effective.” This essay aims to critically analyse the aims, strategies and effects of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, conceived and launched by Unilever in 2004. In particular, it focuses on the worldwide recognition of the campaign, as well as justifying the latter not being a huge success as claimed.

The essay will begin with an overview of the setting up of Dove’s advertising campaign. It aims to outline the development of the market research undertaken and different phases of the campaign along with its main forms of advertisements in order to provide a suitable context for its overall evaluation. The review will start with the main

The results revealed that only 2% of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful (Etcoff et al., 2004). According to Dove’s website, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is “a marketing campaign established in order to widen the definition of beauty as well as provoke discussion on what our society deems beautiful.” The main message of the Dove campaign was that women’s unique differences should be celebrated, rather than ignored, and that physical appearance should be transformed from a source of anxiety to a source of confidence. This message was delivered through a variety of communication means, including TV commercials, magazine ads, and a worldwide conversation via the

“The Creative Destruction of Decision Research” demonstrated how Coca-Cola advertisements elicit emotional responses in their consumers, therefore creating brand loyalty and similarly, Dove uses this idea for consumers to purchase Dove’s products (Loewenstein, 2001). But as a matter of fact, the products Dove sells with the Campaign for Real beauty aren’t good for the skin in general. With more than 7,000 ingredients available to manufacturers, it is even more disturbing that Dove still adds a multitude of the 1,000 known harmful chemicals (Antczak and Antczak, 2001). Not only are the chemicals, synthetic lathering agents and dyes, that are damaging to our absorbent skin, the chemicals are also getting washed down in our drains and harming our environment, sometimes having lasting and even deadly, side effects (McCoy, 2009). Finally, Heiss (2011) argues that the campaign, whose aim is to promote positive body image, in fact represents an ideology of “naïve integration”, and Dove fails to ascribe a real meaning to beauty as its objective intend