Dove Marketing Strategies

Who is the right person to ask for the real meaning of beauty? What are the standards of beauty, and how to be the most beautiful girl in the world? These questions are always on the top of my mind. Today, I am a 26-year-old, it is countless the number of time that I have been exposed the hidden messages in mass media, such as magazines and TV program, for defining the word “beauty”. What I have understood is that this definition is not a constant, in a matter of fact, it is a trend that changes over the year based on the fashion and style experts' opinion.

For women around the world, it has become a constant battle to keep up with these trends that mass media wants us to follow such as a woman code of dress, weights, shapes, and lifestyle. There are many factors that conflict with what the mass media want us to do such as cultural background, ethnicity, the level of education, and religions.

In my opinion, I think global companies around the world, Dove was one of them, have contributed to set this unjustified definition of beauty. Indeed, this the main factor for having an unclear definition of the word "beauty". In the past, Dove had advertised their bar soap to a specific ethnic group and had ignored the rest of their targeted audience even though the Dove soap bar is consumed by many women around the world. Thankfully, Dove has changed their marketing strategies to meet their diverse audiences.

In this blog, I will cover Dove Marketing Strategies and states why Dove is shifting their focus to include as many as women from different ethnicity, cultural background, the level of education, and ages.

Dove Marketing strategies:

Dove is focusing on these three strategies to communicate with their audience: 

• Reverse Marketing

Usually, this is done through traditional means of advertising, such as television advertisements, print magazine advertisements, and online media. In 2004, Dove launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty focusing on the natural beauty of women rather than advertising their product.  The campaign was born out of research the brand commissioned that found that only 2% of surveyed women described themselves as beautiful (1). It aims to celebrate women natural physical variation embodied and to make women feel comfortable in the skin they are in. In this campaign, Dove is highlighting different ages, shapes, sizes and ethnicities.

“Recent research from the Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report revealed that one in two women feels social media puts pressure on them to look a certain way.” (2)

Recently, Dove’s announced their ‘Real Beauty Bottles’ campaign to embody the brand message. Dove has created six exclusive and limited-edition design of Dove Body Washes.The main idea of this campaign is to emphasize that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

Real Beauty Bottles

• Storytelling

Dove communicates and engages with their consumers at an emotional level. For example, in the Dove legacy campaign, Dove was asking all women to help create a positive beauty legacy for the next generation. This commercial ad was featuring mothers were passing on positive messages to their daughters to boost their confidence and self-esteem.” Globally 8 out of 10 girls opt out of key life activities when they don’t feel good about the way they look (3).”Dove used the hashtag #FeelBeautifulFor on Facebook and Twitter to let women and girls all over the world to inspire and share their messages and thoughts to help make beauty a source of confidence.

The Dove Self-Esteem Project

The Project was created in 2004 and the objective is to help the next generation of women grow up feeling happy and confident about the way they look.

"The project delivers self-esteem education to young people (primarily girls) aged 8-17 years through lessons in schools, workshops for youth groups, and online resources for parents."(4)

The project objective is to Educate 20 million more young people around the world on body confidence and self-esteem by 2020.

Dove Self-Esteem Project

• Social media marketing

Dove is using social media to communicate with their consumers, to promote body positivity, and to propel these positive beauty messages to as many women as possible. Most of the Dove targeted audience are in social media who are open to engaging with the brand message as they can express their feeling honestly.

Speak Beautiful

Dove partnership with Twitter to identify negative tweets about beauty and body image posted by women. Then, the Dove account will respond to those tweets in real-time to provide some advice that came directly from social media and self-esteem experts to empower women to speak with more confidence and kindness about beauty online. This campaign encourages women to realize the role their online words will impact their confidence and self-esteem. (5) 

According to research commissioned by Dove,

• 8 out of 10 women encounter negative comments on social media that critique women’s looks.
• 82 percent of women surveyed feel the beauty standards set by social media are unrealistic 
• 4 out of every 5 negative tweets about beauty and body image are written by women critiquing themselves. 

Dove Pro-Age Women

Dove did not ignore their loyal consumers from the old generation. Dove recognized there is no stronger way to build an intimate connection with a woman than to listen and understand what they need in this age stage. Dove message is that aging is natural, and still beautiful. The Pro-Age product line offers a benefit to women who are growing old and still want to maintain their beauty and youthfulness. In Dove Pro-Age Campaign, the commercial ad showed real women over the age of 50 embracing their beauty and proving that beauty has no age limit.

Being bullied, having a low self-esteem and committing suicide are not the only problems that women face. It is a culminating issue that mass media and global companies were the main reason to put women under pressure and turn women life into a nightmare. The problem never ended, in fact, it has shifted from the traditional media to the new media. As a result, the pressure becomes more noticeable as anyone in the virtual world could express their opinions without thinking about other feelings. As a female, I hope that companies change the way of thinking about a woman, and use Dove marketing campaigns as an example to follow. Indeed, Dove as always comes up with a unique idea of marketing to embrace women beauty. Also, their ads touch sensitive topics that are very hard to talk about publicly with an honest opinion. Dove wants to establish having a good connection with the new generation because they are already in social media. The new generations have the more sophisticated knowledge about other brands and they're highly selective in their choices. Also, they value advertising messages that connect them with the brand emotionally and shares valuable insights.