Dove: Real Beauty Campaign

Dove: The Real Beauty Campaign
In 2004, Dove launched a very successful campaign called “The Campaign for Real Beauty” which featured real women, not models, advertising Dove’s firming cream. The campaign was started after Dove conducted a global study on beauty. The study called, “The Real Truth About Beauty: A World Report,” used quantitative data collected from an international study of 3,200 women from ten different countries. Through the study, Dove aimed to explore the relationship women have with beauty, determine how women define beauty, learn the level of satisfaction with women’s beauty and the impact beauty has on the well-being of women. Through two key findings of the study, Dove was able to confirm that the narrow definition of beauty is having a significant impact on the self-esteem of women today. They discovered that only two percent of women around the world consider themselves beautiful and 81 percent of women in the United States strongly agree that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve.” 1
In the first phase, The Dove campaign was communicated to the public through a variety of print and television advertisements, a website, workshops and short films. The advertisements focused on promoting real, natural beauty, in an effort to offset the unrealistically thin and unhealthy archetypal images associated with modeling. The sentiment is articulated quite strongly through their campaign slogan “real women have curves”1 as well as the website which features quotes from each of the “Campaign for Real Beauty” models. In the advertisement, six women all show their happiness and acceptance of their own body shape by laughing and smiling throughout the commercial. This gives more confidence to the consumers with non-standardized body shape, and it also encourages them to see their beauty. One of the women, Sigrid Sutter is quoted saying, “truth is beauty,” while another Staci Nadeau claims...