Reading Reflection #2

Imagine that one day you could be a starring role in a commercial on the TV. Is that cool and excited? Than imagine that the commercial is for a beauty brand. Traditionally, the figures in a beauty brand ad should be slim, rosy cheek, charming eyes, bright skin… 

 

Do you believe that your dark skin, your fat waist, your strong arms could be showed on TV? Sounds ridiculous! But, more and more girls are willing to post such videos on social media platform in which they remove their makeup and show their real face.

People begin to discuss what the real beauty should be. Hourglass figure is charming but very few women could be like that. Bright and silk skin is perfect but mostly because of Photoshop. Commercials make a lot of effort to praise the “perfect and extreme” beauty for a very long time. Girls, because of the effect of those commercials, are less and less confident about their face and figure. A lot of girls have plastic surgeries to pursue, what commercials called, “beauty”.

Nevertheless, Dove did something unusual. In order to revive the brand that was overshadowed by other competitors and boost its sales in the early 2000s, the PR agency, Edelman, conducted a survey. More than 3000 women in 10 countries were in involved in that study (Kiley Skene, 2014). When it reported that only 2 percent of the respondents considered themselves beautiful, the company saw a great opportunity (Nina Bahadur, 2014). They considered to start a conversation about beauty—— later the conversation became the Campaign for Real Beauty. 

They firstly set up a lot of “Tick Box” billboards in Canada, then in the US and the UK. The billboards featured pictures of women along with two boxes such as “withered or wonderful?” in order to let the passersby vote. “The campaign led 1.5 million visitors to the Campaign for Real Beauty website, alerting Dove that it was on the right track —— this was a topic women wanted to talk about” (Nina Bahadur, 2014). 

After that, the company launched a lot of other campaigns, such as billboards that posted groups of common, diverse women in their underwear. These women were not idols or celebrities. They were just common people like you and me and they were not as beautiful as the ladies posted on ads—— slim, pretty, sexy.

Like we imagined at the beginning, Dove also invited common females to engage in their ads. The short movie Evolution was the first double Grand Prix winner in the history of the International Advertising Festival in 2007(Kiley Skene, 2014). This video documented the editing process of the model’s ad on a billboard. An average-looking girl became a model after dressing up with pretty makeup and fashionable hairstyle and photo-shopping.

 Real Beauty Sketches is a viral video in which a police sketch artist portrayed a few women two pictures for each. The first portrait described what the women looked at themselves and the second portrait, also the prettier one, showed the versions in others’ eyes. The video managed to convey the idea that you are more beautiful than you think.

Dove embraced groundswell. They cared about customers’ thoughts and they tried to praise customers’ standards of beauty. Dove used all things, like billboards and videos to convey that every customer was beautiful. These ideas flattered customers. So was the campaign influential? Yes. Thanks to social media, those several widespread videos were posted on the YouTube at first and then became popular. The video Evolution is watched 18,719,318 times and is liked by 36,430 users on YouTube now. There are 158,000 followers on Dove’s Instagram page and the tag “RealBeauty” is used in 123,991 posts even after ten years from the beginning “Tick Box” billboards. A post on Dove Facebook page using the tag of BeautyStory is liked by 145,000 people. With efforts of the entire company, Dove harvested a big success. In 2014, ten years after the first steps in the Campaign for Real Beauty, the sales had increased to $4 billion from $2.5 billion in its opening campaign year.