Dove prekės ženklas

Introduction

The media shows us millions pictures of „beautiful“ people and gives us a lot of “lessons” on how to make ourselves more attractive: how to have better hair, better teeth, better makeup or a better body.

Take any fashion magazine and you will see that almost every fashion advertisement company there uses a thin model who looks happy because she has bright skin, new lipstick, beautiful clothes or because she lost her weight because of some new magic pills. Have yyou seen an overweight male or female appear in the advertisement? This is more proof that we are being manipulated into thinking and being told what is attractive and what isn’t, because if we don’t see the average overweight person in a commercial or billboard advertisement, and only see thin models, it’s just going to be taught to us that fat is bad and thin is good.

Dove, major soap cooperation, made a decision not to support the „perfect image“ by uusing natural beauty in their advertisements. This company wanted to show “real beauty” of “real people” in their ads. That’s why their products are advertised not by young skinny models who you can see only in magazines or on TV bbut by women who you can see in your city every day. That’s how Dove wants to make real change in the way women and young girls perceived and embraced beauty. To most people and especially women Dove brand associates with middle-aged women who like many people of the world have wrinkles or are over-weight but still they are happy about their lives and take great care of themselves.

Evolution of Dove

In 1955, Lever Brothers introduced Dove, which contained a patented, mild cleansing ingredient, into the soap category. It was positioned as a „bar of soap“ with one-fourth cleansing cream that moisturizes skin while washing as opposed to the drying effect of regular soap. Advertisements reinforced the message by showing tthe cream being poured into the soap.

In 1979, dermatologists showed that Dove dried and irritated skin significantly less than ordinary soaps, based on which Dove started aggressive marketing and won more than 24% of the market by 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org).

Some key facts:

• the world’s number 1 cleansing brand

• sales of over € 2.5 billion a year in over 80 countries

• outsells all other skin care bars combined in the US

• over 1 billion showers taken with Dove products in the US each year (http://www.unilever.com) <

Later Dove expanded into other “personal care” categories – including body wash, hair care, facial cleansing and moisturizing. Finally soap represented only less than half of its sales. Although Dove portfolio had totally changed into that of beauty brand, consumers still perceived Dove as a bar of soap.

A big team was set to reinvent Dove as a beauty brand. It appeared that there were hundreds of competitors in the beauty category and they all didn’t really differentiate from one another. In order to determine the optimal beauty strategy for Dove that would set the brand apart from its competitors a global consumer research study was made.

The results were stunning:

• Only two percent of women describe themselves as beautiful.

• Sixty-three percent strongly agree that society expects women to enhance their physical attractiveness. Forty-five percent of women feel women who are more beautiful have greater opportunities in life.

• More than two-thirds (68%) of women strongly agree that „the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most woman can’t ever achieve.“

• The majority (76%) wish female beauty was portrayed in the media as being made up of more than just physical attractiveness.

• Seventy-five percent went on to say that they wish the media did a bbetter job of portraying women of diverse physical attractiveness, including age, shape and size (http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com).

In order to personify the notion that real beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and ages, real women were used in the advertising rather than models.At the same time Dove established The Campaign for Real Beauty that aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty. The campaign exhorted all women to love their bodies every day. The general target for The Campaign for Real Beauty is women age 27-67 (http://www.thearf.com).

Later, as part of Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, the Dove Self Esteem Fund (DSEF) was launched in 2004 and formalized the brand’s support to combat eating disorders (http://www.strategymag.com). This Fund seeks to educate and inspire young girls through a series of tools and workshops to become fully realized adults. Through the Fund they aim to reach the lives of 5 million young people by the end of 2010, with at least one hour of participation in one of their self-esteem programs. To make change possible, the Dove Self-Esteem Fund focuses its efforts to foster positive image-related self-esteem in two areas of activity:

• The Fund develops aand distributes resources that enable and empower women and girls to embrace a broad definition of beauty

• The Fund provides needed resources to organizations that foster a broader definition of beauty (http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com).

Campaign for Real Beauty

Dove made more things that could help them to reach their goal. They created a short film showing steps required to turn a woman into a billboard-ready model – from hair, makeup, photography and lighting and even to Photoshop. This film was created to encourage girls to participate in Dove-sponsored “real beauty” workshops in conjunction with the brand’s Self-Esteem Fund. The most interesting thing is that no Dove products were advertised in that short film, but the brand message was so powerful that it sounded through the world: 2 million YouTube hits in the first two weeks, over six million now. It was most viewed on YouTube for day, week and month in October 2006. Most viewed story on CNN.com on October 24 ...