Embracing the #RealBeauty with Dove
“You are more beautiful than you think” – Dove has always been an inspirational brand for women globally. It has always gone beyond conventions while making any ad campaign.
Since the beginning, cosmetic & skincare brands and fashion brands have attributed beauty as fair skin maidens, thin, long-legged women who set forth an unrealistic definition of ‘beautiful and gorgeous’. This ideology not only crushed the confidence of regular women but also, changed the perception of ‘beautiful’ in their eyes. Due to streamlining of beauty in one category, women believed that being beautiful has nothing to do with raw vulnerability a woman possesses, but the adaptation to fit a category that has been structured by the society.
After the scrutinizing efforts of every brand, it became important to break the obsolete rules of beauty and give rise to the power of real beauty to make its way. This is what the brand, Dove offered, i.e. ‘embracing the beauty in you’.
The brand, Dove has a different notion of beauty that it shows through its ad campaigns and product designs which are available in variant sizes and shapes, denoting that beauty exists in different forms, shapes and sizes, holding within, the essence of #RealBeauty.
Dove is one of the world’s leading skincare brands, which has always made campaigns without any celebrity influence, instead, the brand has always invitingly put forth an unknown face to connect with the real women embracing life to produce extraordinary campaign ideas.
With its new ad campaign of #RealBeauty, Dove has tried to create an impact on the consumers with their opening line, which is,
“In a country of 631 million women, there is still only one face of beauty, when there is so much more to be admired.”
Let’s read the real story of #RealBeauty
The theme for Dove’s campaign in India this time was, ‘Let’s Break the Rules of Beauty’. This 51-seconds ad film featured each & every, different version of beautiful women from the length and breadth of our country.
The Dove campaign for real beauty launches this massive campaign for India, which invites women of all ages, complexion, shapes and sizes to share their opinions and admire themselves for who they are. It was important to celebrate #RealBeauty when it has gone through the knife of scrutiny so much, especially in a country like India. The diversity of the nation speaks for the diverse beauty it has, which needs to be admired.
Featuring Indian women was a part of the marketing strategy, as India is evolving at fast pace while the country still believes in the traditionally stricken beauty ideals, and so connecting to Indian women becomes even more challenging, for any global brand. Even in modern India, the perception of beauty lies in the fairer skin, while the other versions of beauty are criticized.
Dealing with this ugly truth, Dove has been the brand, that women prize as a beauty asset and not just as a soap. Their ads have always broken the conventional rhythm by embracing the beauty one is born with, as Dove has always prepared their campaigns around real beauty and emphasized that women are beautiful regardless of their physical appearance.
One can also say that the Dove campaign for real beauty has established #RealBeauty as their marketing agenda for the colossal support they have portrayed for women throughout the spectrum of media & time, when it comes to unrealistic standards of beauty.
Dove has very well inscribed all its important points around #RealBeauty, to create an immediate brand recall with their theme. Testimonials have been used always in their ads denoting that the last word is always of the customer.
The Experiential Connect
One cannot ignore the range of products that Dove provides which also follow the same guideline of loving yourself as you are. This is why Dove’s another initiative, regarding their hair products was a successful one.
Although Dove Arabia produced the ad campaign, but you can see the idea is on the lines of experiential marketing.
To briefly put it there, you can see three women who’re experiencing a bad hair day, are invited to the Dove’s experts to understand their hair and help in managing it better. The women are someone amongst the crowd, with whom other women can connect.
Next, they’re exposed to the campaign set up by Dove, but the product doesn’t come in limelight as much as the experience they provide to these women does. However, they’re indirectly promoting the product, but mainly focus on providing an experience to remember, which will make them use the product, and gain control over their bad hair days, turning them into loving their hair all-the-time. So one, cannot overlook that the techniques they are using are more experiential in nature and that’s how, one can connect Dove’s campaign for Wake Up to Good Hair with experiential marketing.
If you’re not convinced, I have more insights on the campaigns produced by Dove, which support experiential marketing in more than one way.
Have a look!
The above #ChooseBeautiful campaign of Dove was conducted worldwide in San Francisco, Delhi, Shanghai, London, and Sao Paulo. While this campaign shows a building’s entrance doors marked as, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Average’.
The idea was to draw the attention of women passing through, about how much they’re insecure because of living in a conditioned society which has always aimed at lowering down their self-esteem, and by doing this #ChooseBeautiful campaign, Dove hopes that the idea of feeling beautiful will uproar, making them feel better about themselves.
#ChooseBeautiful campaign involved real people and was an initiative that made every women think, ponder and experience a feeling that they’d take with them which could either make their day or affect their mood. Walking through either of the door, was an experience in itself – the experience of feeling beautiful or succumbing to the society pressure of not meeting the “beauty standards”.
So you see, how well, an Experiential Marketing campaign can influence consumers’ mind and indirect promote the motto behind the brand, Dove and not the product.
Dove has similarly influenced the Indian market, where another experiential marketing campaign had been organized about Dove soap. Since Dove likes to be considered as a beauty bar, yet the reason is as follows.
So you see, how well organized was the campaign indicating not a comparison test between brands and Dove, but making the ordinary public in the mall to think about the effects of other soaps like, beauty soaps, hygiene soaps, natural soaps, sandalwood soaps & others, against Dove soap.
The focus was majorly on the litmus test paper which indicates about the alkalinity of a soap that has harsh effects on our skin. Sensitization of this was integral to the campaign which ignited a promotional base for Dove soap against other soap products. This was an experiential marketing campaign which was set inside a mall, interfacing many women to understand these effects, which is nothing but providing an experience witnessing through this test.
So, now even you’d feel that it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Dove has relied on experiential marketing since a long time because connecting with their consumers has always been of prime importance for every brand, and for the brand Dove, achieving customer connection means achieving customer value.
However, launching the new Dove Pink on Ramadan, affirms the experiential marketing side of the brand even more, that I just stated, as the ad presents a face from the crowd, Parinaz Buhariwalla, a collegiate from Mumbai, which also highlights their baseline of experiential marketing in its long journey of empowering women of accepting their bold & raw self, since “Everybody is beautiful.”
(Click here to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5loD0nZFnQ)
