Unilever's Dove brand won accolades a few years ago for its "Campaign for Real Beauty" because it declared that women didn't need to aspire to inane absolutes of appearance and, by inference, told them that they shouldn't feel obligated to buy expensive cosmetics.
Oops. It worked.
To think that a marketing campaign not intended to sell anything would constitute a success would have been laughable a generation ago, but in our era of conversation-for-the-sake-of-conversation, it made perfect sense.
It was corporate citizenship, only with no pretense of purpose, which made it non-commercial speech (duh) and, thus, qualified it as genuine Grade A fodder for transmission via the chatter of online social media.
The advertising effectively said that you don't need to buy Dove products. How hot was that?
I guess the bet was that somehow, someday, someway, someone would remember that, and then come up with some other reason to buy a bar of Dove soap. I'd have loved to have seen that strategic equation before the braintrust at Unilever approved the millions it spent on the campaign. It probably put my Dim Bulb Equation to shame.
Now, the company's cooler heads are prevailing, and there's a new campaign that links buying products with supporting Dove's corporate citizenship. It maintains a fund, called the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, that helps kids resist the siren call of idealized beauty.
So let me see if I follow the new pitch:
- Women shouldn't buy beauty products, because...
- They're already beautiful, just the way they are, but...
- If they would buy Dove beauty products, they'll...
- Support a charity that tells women that they shouldn't buy beauty products, because...
- They're already beautiful, just the way they are, but...
- Repeat, as necessary for quarterly earnings
It's beautiful, isn't it? I just wonder if it's going to work.
Dove's post-purpose marketing concept relied on lots of hope for/maybes (see above), only it buried those variables under the blanket cover of conversation. The new expectation is more traditional: people will buy products in conscious support of the Dove charity. No exact promise of amount or percentage (it's probably inconsequential, but what charity giveback isn't?). The brand's marketing director says "...now it's time to let people know what we've been doing to build self-esteem."
There were many more directly relevant and motivational angles Dove could have chosen:
- Instead of debunking false concepts of beauty, how about promoting real ones? A campaign could assert individuality, and encouraging women "to express who you are, whatever that looks like." I don't presume to write the creative copy, but you get the idea. Skip the good works, and focus on empowerment
- Create a real charitable product. How about shelving the silly tie-in positioning, and offering a product that is dedicated to improving support for women's self-esteem. No questions, no percentages: 100% committed from 100% of sales of something. What a statement that would make, eh?
- Pick a real issue that doesn't require an explanation. What if Dove products were dedicated to eradicating eating disorders, or teen suicide? How many people would buy the stuff on those merits alone? Less explanation means more relevance, or at least more immediacy. "Self-esteem" sounds really big and nebulous, albeit importantly so
Instead, Dove has spent a few years freeing its branding into the ether of consumer consciousness, and is now trying to tie it back to some business purpose.
They're raising the bar on themselves. I suspect that proving you can promote something and sell nothing is a lot harder to do than actually making money with branding.
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