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Company: Dove-Unilever
Agency: Edelman
Timeframe: 2004 - present
Boosting brand awareness in the cluttered health and beauty products market is tricky, but the global beauty brand Dove distinguished their U.S. launch of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (CFRB) and the new Dove Firming product line by executing a new marketing approach: Engaging female consumers by abandoning typical practices of presenting "perfect" women as beauty role models. Instead, the Unilever-owned company, along with Edelman, decided that images of ordinary women would be helpful in widening the definition of beauty, inspiring women to discover and enjoy their beauty and instilling the Dove brand with a revolutionary, label-debunking beauty philosophy.
"The vast majority of women in the U.S. suggested that media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty -- as if beautiful was only thin, only young, only blonde," says Larry Koffler, senior vice president/consumer brands group at Edelman. "The foundation came from this process of looking at the environment, looking at what was happening and ultimately listening to women and debunking these stereotypes."
Dove was historically known for being an iconic beauty bar, but "if people were to look at us in other categories, we needed to understand what women's relationships are with their bodies," says Stacie Bright, senior communications marketing manager at Dove-Unilever.
To begin understanding this intimate relationship, Dove developed a global study conducted by StrategyOne, Edelman's opinion research division, which surveyed more than 3,000 women from 10 countries. The women revealed feelings about their appearance and about how they think media typically portrays beauty. Survey results concluded:
* 2% of women worldwide describe themselves as beautiful; and,
* 81% of U.S. women strongly agree that "the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can't ever achieve."
The survey became the foundation for all aspects of the campaign, including its main objectives, target audience, strategy and key messages. "CFRB was born from the global study that validated the collective hypothesis of the group that the definition of beauty had become limited and unattainable," Koffler says.
Making CFRB successful required a strategy that meshed with the Dove brand itself. It had to be "rooted on an idea that fundamentally was the essence of the brand," Bright says.
CFRB had...