My Dream Campaign: Dove Campaign for Real Beauty

Self-acceptance is a universal topic. Parents try to instill it in their children. Teachers attempt to reinforce it. And as a society, we love to discuss it.

In the early 2000s, mainstream media became consumed with speculating about potential eating disorders from celebrities like Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle “Is this woman too skinny?” magazine headlines screamed. In addition, heavier women were also capturing headlines for being too curvy. Conversations about body image were everywhere and the dialogue was toxic, especially for impressionable young girls.Dove dove into uncharted waters in 2004 when it launched Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The campaign started in response to a survey that showed only 2 percent of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful (Etcoff, Orbach, Scott, & D’Agostino, 2004). Dove executed on the following: It found a team of real women of all different sizes and ethnicities and enlisted them to represent Dove. They unabashedly showed their curves in a variety of advertisements and even appeared on Oprah, engaging in an open dialogue about their bodies, self-image and confidence.

The campaign never had the strong, in-your-face call to action for consumers to buy its products. Instead, it took a narrative approach of telling real women’s stories in a way that no brand had before. It put a face (and body) to the cause with pictures of everyday women bearing it all. Advertisements showed a real woman with questions like “Fit or fat?” or “Flawed or flawless?” that jumpstarted the conversation. It was about initiating and continuing a dialogue with women to inspire them to feel beautiful.

Dove real-women copy

For Dove, it wasn’t about a hard push to sell products. What’s even more interesting is that, never before, has a brand been able to successfully immerse itself so effectively into a social issue the way Dove did. Dove saw an opportunity to understand this disheartening statistic, along with the negative conversations about the female body in the early 2000s, through the power of positive storytelling.

When I think about my dream campaign to work on, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty rises to the top. Why? Because Dove, I believe, pioneered today’s ever-popular focus on storytelling. It found a way to do two things – tell a story that wasn’t being told at the time and start a positive dialogue about a sensitive issue. And the campaign did this brilliantly; a decade later, we still remember it like it was yesterday, and it has since inspired multiple spinoff campaigns.In my mind, this makes Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty a piece of marketing genius (and beauty).