Dove Case

Q1. Obviously Dove's new campaign has caught people's attention. It's been mentioned over several prestigious shows including: Jay Leno's late night show, Oprah Winfrey made a show on self-esteem, Ellen Degeneres loved the idea of real women beauty, and news casters reported continuously. I remember when the first time Evolution video by Dove was aired on Youtube.com, everybody was talking about how scary the computer based new media is - "No wonder our vision is distorted". The idea behind the campaign - "attacking conventional anorexic view of beauty" is in some way matching,and in some way is contradicting the hot "Green movement" of effective consumption of resources. Christina Aguilera once sang: "...you are beautiful no matter what they say, don't let them bring you down..." Feeling comfortable about the way one looks without any cosmetic changes, being genuine, being natural is especially important for young girls who are bombarded by cosmetics commercial 247.

After reading about a dozen blogs, or portal sites about the Real Beauty Campaign by Dove, it has become evident that women are touched in "some" level that they identify themselves to one of the 6 ladies on Dove's ad boards. Some sites note that the new campaign's response rate surpassed 700%. Utilizing the internet, Dove's management really got the hold of global attention on female beauty issue. To reach women on the personal level they launched several programs through their funds site. But besides all the successful entry and sales of Dove mainly attributed to the new campaign, several blogs have mentioned some of the campaign's flaws.

Rebecca Traister on Salon.com said:
… as long as you're patting yourself on the back for hiring real-life models with imperfect bodies, thereby "challenging today's stereotypical view of beauty and inspiring women to take great care of themselves," why ask those models to flog a cream that has zero health value and is just an expensive and temporary Band-Aid for a "problem" that the media has told us we have with our bodies.

Others say that if Dove is redefining its position among women, then the whole Unilever product line should identify with the message. Unilever is the head of several pro-model brands. http://aseachange.com/blog-illusionists/?p=22
On the same blog, the writer criticized Dove on how much photoshop effects been used to "fix" those 6 "down to earth" characters.

http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/07/22/dove/index1.html
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/teachable_moments/campaignrealbeauty.cfm

These are all minor effects to the great wave Dove has created, but in the end Dove is a beauty product, what good does it make to pat one on the shoulder and say you are beautiful and buy my product?

Q2. The threat of new media on Dove
Compared to what and how mainstream media worked, the mainstream media of today is not as fragmented as it was. On cultureby.com of the endnote 1, Grant McCracken mentioned of P&G's manager about him relying on 3 main news networks to send advertising to 85% of the U.S, but now the internet or the "big cloud" is shaping new consumption behavior and new marketing concepts. With the invention of Web 2.0, the ever increasing internet users creating and consuming information. What they say matters to the sales of a new product. Businesses of the 20th century rooted for repeat purchasers, but with global reach of the internet access, one time successful promotion to only a half of internet users can make one a millionaire.

Dove's new marketing campaign has been successful due to the velocity with help of internet users, bloggers and tubers (youtube users) to be specific. Winston Churchill once said: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Bad comments spread over mainstream sites will be like a fire in forest of Sahara. Consumers have become smart at filtering advertisements. Unless it is what most of the cybercitizens agree with, otherwise 30 seconds of a poorly researched, less thought, less modern advertisement is able to destroy multi-billion dollar company in time than an evening's length of time.