Dove Campaign for Real Beauty

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a worldwide marketing campaign launched by Unilever in 2004 aiming to build self confidence in women and young children. Dove's partners in the campaign included Ogilvy, Edelman Public Relations, and Harbinger Communications (in Canada) along with other consultants. Part of the overall project was the Evolution campaign.

Campaign
In 2004, Dove and Ogilvy organized a photography exhibit titled "Beyond Compare: Women Photographers on Real Beauty". The show featured work from 67 female photographers which led to the Real Beauty campaign. The Dove Real Beauty campaign was conceived in 2004 during a three-year creative strategic research effort, conducted in partnership with three universities, led by Joah Santos. The creative was conceived by Ogilvy Düsseldorf and London.

The study resulted in a new consumer-centric versus product-centric advertising strategy, which Joah Santos referred to as P.O.V. - Purpose | Objective | Vision. The plan abandoned Unilever's traditional brand essence ladder in favor of a POV strategy "To make women feel comfortable in their own skin and to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence rather than anxiety." The original advertising research indicated that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful.

The first stage of the campaign centered on a series of billboard advertisements, initially put up in Germany and United Kingdom, and later worldwide. The spots showcased photographs of regular women (in place of professional models), taken by noted portrait photographer Rankin. The ads invited passersby to vote on whether a particular model was, for example, "Fat or Fab" or "Wrinkled or Wonderful", with the results of the votes dynamically updated and displayed on the billboard itself. Accompanying the billboard advertisements was the publication of the "Dove Report", a corporate study in which Unilever intended to "[create] a new definition of beauty [which] will free women from self-doubt and encourage them to embrace their real beauty."

According to Ad Age, the campaign successfully increased sales of Dove soap from $2 billion to $4 billion in three years.

The series received significant media coverage from talk shows, women's magazines, and mainstream news broadcasts and publications, generating media exposure that Unilever has estimated to be worth more than 30 times the paid-for media space. Following this success, the campaign expanded into other media with a series of television spots (Flip Your Wigs and the Pro-Age series, among others) and print advertisements ("Tested on Real Curves"), culminating in the 2006 Little Girls global campaign, which featured regional versions of the same advertisement in both print and screen, for which Unilever purchased a 30-second spot in the commercial break during Super Bowl XL at an estimated cost of $2.5 million.

In 2006, Ogilvy sought to extend the campaign further by creating viral videos. The first video, Daughters, consisted of filmed interviews about how mothers and daughters related to modern perceptions of beauty and the beauty industry. Dove's Self-Esteem Fund released statistics to support the idea that young women and girls are likelier to have distorted views of beauty. During the production of Daughters, a series of short films entitled "Beauty Crackdown" was pitched to Unilever as an "activation idea".

Art director Tim Piper proposed to create Evolution with the budget left over from Daughters (C$135,000). It was designed to get viewers to find the campaign website to watch Daughters and to participate in mother-daughter workshops. After Evolution, Ogilvy produced Onslaught and Amy. Onslaught is a video about the influence that the beauty industry can have on young girls.

In April 2013, a video titled Dove Real Beauty Sketches was released as part of the campaign, created by Hugo Veiga. It went viral, attracting strong reactions from the public and media. In the video, several women describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist who cannot see his subjects. The same women are then described by strangers whom they met the previous day. The sketches are compared, with the stranger's image invariably being both more flattering and more accurate. The differences create strong reactions when shown to the women.

In October 2013, Free Being Me, a collaboration between Dove and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts was launched, with the aim of increasing "self-esteem and body confidence" in girls.

In 2017, Dove and Ogilvy London created limited-edition versions of body wash bottles meant to look like different body shapes and sizes. Dove produced 6,800 bottles of the six different designs and sent them to 15 different countries.

Reaction
The Dove Campaign was one of the first campaigns considered as going "viral", a relatively new phenomenon in 2004. Ad Age ranked the campaign number 1 in a list of the top ad campaigns of the 21st century.

Individual ads caused different reactions, both positive and negative. Evolution won two Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards. Katy Young at The Daily Telegraph called Real Beauty Sketches "one campaign that will make you think, and hopefully, feel more beautiful."

Tanzina Vega at The New York Times interviewed an advertising exec who liked the message that "Many women undervalue themselves and also the way they look". Others criticized the ad's message as self-contradictory. Vega interviewed a 24-year-old viewer who said, "at the heart of it all is that beauty is still what defines women. It is a little hypocritical".

Women in the target audience expressed mixed responses. Kate Fridkis at Psychology Today approved of the overall message, but noted that the models were mostly white, thin, and young. Fridkis also criticized Dove for patronizing women about their physical insecurities while being part of an industry that encourages women to find self-worth in their appearances. Erin Keane at Salon argued that Dove was "peddling the same old beauty standards as empowerment".

Critics believe that the campaign focuses too greatly on the physical aspect of beauty instead of other forms of self-worth. Ann Friedman of The Cut argued, "These ads still uphold the notion that, when it comes to evaluating ourselves and other women, beauty is paramount. The goal shouldn't be to get women to focus on how we are all gorgeous in our own way. It should be to get women to do for ourselves what we wish the broader culture would do: judge each other based on intelligence and wit and ethical sensibility, not just our faces and bodies."

Others expressed concerns that while Dove portrays their models as unedited and "real", the images have actually been photoshopped to smooth the appearance of the women's skin, hide wrinkles and blemishes, fix stray hairs, etc. Photo retoucher Pascal Dangin of Box Studios told The New Yorker he edited the photos, saying "Do you know how much retouching was on that?"

Nina Bahadur at HuffPost interviewed a Dove spokesperson who said Dove seeks to bring more awareness of beauty standards to women of different ages and cultural backgrounds.

Critics and defenders have both pointed out that one ad campaign seeking to redefine beauty is unlikely to solve a widespread social problem of women and girls feeling physical insecurities. Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross at Psych Central estimated 80 percent of American women feel dissatisfied with their bodies. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders cited a 1991 study estimating 81 percent of 10-year-old girls were afraid of becoming "fat".

The campaign has been criticized on the grounds that Unilever also produces Fair and Lovely, a skin-lightening product marketed at dark-skinned women in several countries. Unilever brand Lynx's advertising campaign contradicted the sentiment of the Campaign for Real Beauty. Moreover, Unilever owns Axe hygiene products, which are marketed to men using overtly sexualized women, and SlimFast diet bars. Will Burns at Forbes called such criticism "irrelevant", arguing that consumers would not be able to recognize that these brands shared a parent company.