Behind the Hype: Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign

Dove launched a new advertising campaign this year called Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. The campaign received heavy media coverage and according to Dove, the campaign’s goal is to present “a view of beauty that all women can own and enjoy everyday.’’ The campaign uses real women ranging in size from 6-12, unfortunately some of the ads are pushing firming cream that promises to visibly reduce cellulite. Street Cents examines whether Dove wants to turn beauty standards/stereotypes on their ear or just turn a profit.

Behind the Campaign

The Dove Campaign Manifesto: For too long, beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling stereotypes. Women have told us it's time to change all that. Dove agrees. We believe real beauty comes in many shapes, sizes and ages. That is why Dove is launching the Campaign for Real Beauty.

Dove's global Campaign for Real Beauty aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty. A view of beauty that all women can own and enjoy everyday.

Before the campaign came out, Dove had commissioned a major study that was based on 3,200 interviews with women ages 18 to 64. Two-thirds of the respondents answered that the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women felt they could never achieve. The survey also found that no women described themselves as gorgeous, 1% said they were stunning and only 2% thought they're beautiful. As for the others, about three-quarters rate their beauty as average. Meanwhile, nearly half the women globally and 60% of U.S. women said their weight was "too high."

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, the average American model is 6 feet 1 and weighs 117 pounds, while the average American woman is shorter and plumper at 5 feet 4 and 140 pounds.

British Medical Association study from 2000 revealed that the body fat of models and actresses portrayed in the media is at least 10 percent less than that of an active, healthy woman.

Linda Wells, editor of Allure magazine, writes “The most sought after look is the natural look. We just did a study [of 1,000 respondents] and the words they used most often to describe their looks were natural and real. Those words were used far more than beautiful and pretty and even higher than sexy and glamorous. That’s a shift.”

Why Dove Started the Campaign

“We knew the way beauty brands behaved and the way they portrayed women wasn’t quite right,” says Olivia Johnson, strategic planner on Dove at Ogilvy and Mather in London. “The team’s intuitive sense as human beings was that it made them feel a bit demoralized and a bit miserable. It makes you feel deflated when you see the gap between these images of perfection and your own physical reality”.

When the team viewed the ads from competitors they were struck by the fact that most used images of size two teenagers who wouldn’t need the products they were attached to.

The Launch of the Campaign

The Dove campaign uses real women instead of professional models. The women in the print ads range in age from 22 to 96 and a cover a variety of sizes. In the American ads the women ranged in dress size from 6 to 12 (average size for American women is 14). For the campaign the images were shot by in-demand fashion photographer David Rankin. Dove guarantees the images in the campaign have not been airbrushed in any way.

Responses from the Press

Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine, has been quoted as saying, “It is a change that women – and some men, too – have been agitating for 35 years. I spent 15 years of my life pleading for ads that reflected our readers by age, race, ethnicity. We could demonstrate that women responded better to ads that were more inclusive of them, but they just weren’t coming.”

Ann Kearney-Cooke, coauthor of “Change Your Mind, Change Your Body” said “This is a really courageous move by Dove and I hope it’s going to pay off. There might be some strong reactions because they are going against years of this ultra thin image, but I think we have to hang in there.”

Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Richard Roeper was criticized for saying, “ Chunky women in their underwear have surrounded my house. Billboards of chunky women, that is .... There's no doubt the ads are attention-getting. Let's put it this way: this is the first time in 3,000-plus columns that I've ever mentioned Dove soap. Now here's where I'm supposed to say that I find it refreshing to see "real people" on billboards, given that our culture is so obsessed with youth and beauty, and that most billboards feature impossibly gorgeous, ridiculously thin women who have been airbrushed to a level of perfection that 99.9 percent of the population can never reach. But the raw truth is, I find these Dove ads a little unsettling. If I want to see plump gals baring too much skin, I'll go to Taste of Chicago, OK? I'll walk down Michigan Avenue or go to Navy Pier. When we're talking women in their underwear on billboards outside my living room windows, give me the fantasy babes, please. If that makes me sound superficial, shallow and sexist -- well yes, I'm a man. And I'll have to point out that most of the men who appear on billboards and in magazines and on TV commercials are just as genetically blessed as their female counterparts.”

Chicago Sun Times reporter, Lucio Guerrero called the ad campaign, disturbing and went on to write that “Really, the only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it.”

Chicago CBS affiliate news reporter, Bill Zwecker said that “at the risk of sounding politically incorrect, in this day and age, when we are facing a huge obesity problem in this country, we don’t need to encourage anyone---women or men---to think it’s okay to be out of shape.”

Several billboard ads have been defaced with graffiti such as I Hate My Agent! , Fat Girls Can Be Corporate Shills Too and much harsher profanity laden comments.”

Bob Garfield of Advertising Age called the campaign ‘confounding’ and then added “sizes six and eight notwithstanding, they’re still head turners with straight white teeth, no visible pores and not a sign of cellulite”.

Barbara Altman Bruno, a clinical social worker who specializes in body image issues, believes that the Dove spots, along with other examples of reality advertising, are disingenuous. She is in favour of the use of larger sized women as models, but refers to the method of using them to sell cellulite cream as “a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing approach”.

While interviewing Jennifer Pozner of Women in Media and News, she revealed to Street Cents that each time she was interviewed by a reporter on the subject of the Dove ads, they, would without fail, refer to the models as ‘fat’.

At Street Cents we felt we needed to look at the campaign a little closer and critically. Sure it was great that Dove had created a Self Esteem Fund and was showcasing real beauty as opposed to airbrushed images, but still weren’t they selling firming cream in some of the ads? Weren’t they playing on the insecurities that got us into this mess in the first place? What besides enlightenment did Dove stand to gain? Just how committed to Real Beauty were they?

The Campaign Pay-off

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty generated double-digit growth for the brand in the second business quarter of 2005. Dove sales were up 11.4% the first quarter of 2005. Dove’s total U.S. dollar sales rose 6 percent to 500 Million.

Author Jonah Bloom remarked, “ You think Dove hatched ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ because it cares about women’s self-esteem? No, it simply wanted to play to the pack-following newsrooms all over the country that it knew would give the campaign more media coverage than it could have bought with a decade’s worth of marketing.”

The Product

The firming products (body wash, lotion, and cream) make some interesting claims:

• The body wash label says it “moisturizes to improve skin’s elasticity in ten day.”
• The lotion label says testing proves…after 2 weeks, skin is noticeably firmer.”
• The cream promises that in two weeks “the appearance of cellulite is visibly reduced.”

The language avoids making explicit health claims which would require FDA approval.

Stephen Mandy, a clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Miami stated in the Washington Post (July 25, 2005) that there are only two substances that have been shown to reduce cellulite: caffeine (applied topically) and aminophylline. Neither of these substances are listed as ingredients in any of Dove’s firming products.

Who is Really Behind the Dove Hype?

Unilever is Dove’s parent company and they also manufacture AXE Body Spray as well as the Slimfast line of products. AXE, in particular, is known for its ad that relies heavily on gender stereotypes and traditional standards for beauty. They’re not products that are particularly affirming for ‘real’ women. How committed are Dove and Unilever to the campaign for real beauty? Enough to excise gender stereotypes from AXE ads? And should we trust a company that is trying to sell us diet shakes and a be happy with yourself attitude all at the same time?

In an interview in the World Street Journal, Dove was asked the following; “It seems the use of ordinary women in your ads has sparked an ad movement. Are other Unilever brands considering using ordinary folks in their ads?” They responded, “No I think we are very keen that every brand has a point of differentiation.”

In Canada the Dove Self-Esteem Fund is launching a cinema and TV ad featuring real Canadian girls aged five to fourteen. The spot, which uses the Cyndi Lauper song True Colors, shows several images of girls, with voice-overs that indicate things they don’t like about themselves. The Dove Self-Esteem Fund is financially supporting the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC) and the Quebec Association for assistance to persons suffering from Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia (ANEB). The ads created by Ogilvy and Mather in Toronto, also direct viewers to campaign for realbeauty.ca.

The Copycats

Dove wasn’t the only one to use reality in its ad campaigns in 2005.

Nike introduced a print ad campaign earlier this year for exercise gear for women. The ads celebrate body parts rarely seen in ads. One ad reads, “My butt is big and round like the letter C and ten thousand lunges have made it rounder, but not smaller. And that’s just fine. It’s a space heater for my side of the bed. It’s my ambassador. To those who walk behind me, it’s a border collie that herds skinny women away from the best deals at clothing sales. My butt is big and that’s just fine. And those who might scorn it are invited to kiss it.”

Levi’s Story for Every Style 2004-2005 campaign, which was the jean manufacturer’s largest print campaign, featured black and white ads of regular people, from a variety of backgrounds and occupations, wearing their favourite style of jeans.

Women in Media and News

Street Cents interviewed Jennifer Pozner of Women and Media and News and author of the article, Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ Backlash. Pozner feels that if the sole aim of the Dove Campaign was to “advance female ideals of beauty” than “they should use these models across the board” and not just to move firming cream. One of the philosophical ideas of firming creams is that the natural aging process is flawed”, the ads seem to give with one hand (‘Natural Beauty is celebrated’) and take with the other (‘natural aging is wrong and has to be stopped’).

Pozner takes issue with “aesthetic objections” masquerading as “health concerns” such as those lodged by Bill Zwecker who thought the ads promoted obesity. “This attack would have been more convincing if the Dove models were unhealthily overweight” (in fact , they’re fit, curvy, and actually smaller sized than the average American woman). It’s boggling to media critics like Pozner that ads like the Dove Campaign get tagged as unhealthy and ads that use composite and airbrushed photos, essentially featuring women that don’t and in many cases can’t exist, are accepted as the norm.