Application of Advertising Strategy - Dove: Real Beauty

Application of Advertising Strategy- Dove: Real Beauty
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Introduction
Unilever launched the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ campaign in 2004, with the aim of broadening appeal for the personal care products. Unilever is a consumer supplier company with global operations with differentiated portfolio of goods. Dove is one of the main products of the personal care segment. In 2013 the personal are segment contributed 33.3% of the company’s total revenue (Canadean Company Reports, 2013, p. 17). Dove a division of Unilever created the Real Beauty Campaign to offer a platform for customer dialogue, where the ‘alienated women’ who were not represented by the stereotypical perceptions of beauty through creating a brand narrative that engaged with the potential customers, Dove was set apart from the rivals. This is an application of advertising concepts framework to the case of the Real Beauty Campaign by Dove.
Campaign strategy
The real beauty campaign advertisement by the Dove was created as the company sought to expand operations into the beauty care line of products. The idea behind the campaign was that every woman is beautiful despite the bombardment of specific thin model shapes in the mass media (Burkley, 2014, p. 470). The conversation about beauty then presents scenarios where people got interested with the advertising industry for simply falsifying how the average woman feels about beauty. The attempt to celebrate natural beauty regardless of the woman’s colour, shapes and sizes demonstrated that the priorities of women were not always being projected by the commercial mass media. The messages surrounding the campaign were to celebrate women who are comfortable with themselves. The beauty industry highlights beauty as having an ideal body type while marketing beauty products to women.
The campaign strategy employed by Unilever was able to shift the focus from the narrative of an ideal body/ woman size to celebrating women of diverse shape, sizes as well as color. The previous beauty campaign used models and girls with model figures particularly of Caucasian origin to be the epitome of beauty. However, these were false ideals of beauty and the average woman could not relate with the images being shown in advertisement campaigns. Ordinarily, most women would not be able to achieve the body type being projected, highlighting that the beauty advertising campaigns may out of touch in their portrayal of women (Lori, 2013, p. 200). In other words, the Dove, Real Beauty campaign challenges the notion that there is an ideal body type. The Real Beauty Campaign was an innovation to target the female audience by using the everyday women and not the professional models. The empirical basis of the campaign was the proposition that beauty was within reach for every woman (Spurgeon, 2007, p. 52).
Evaluation of the campaign
Lavidge & Steiner’s hierarchy-of-effects models one of the frameworks that explain the most effective advertising planning. The model assumes that for an ad to be effective it passes through six stages from awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction to purchase. The advertisements need to create inters and be memorable for them to have a long lasting effect on potential buyers. The Dove: Real Beauty advertising campaign relies on persuasion, that what was being projected was authentic, and this differentiated the company’s products from those of rivals. The buyers were then likely to be highly motivated since the advertising message showed real beauty by touching the buyers emotions that the product as authentic.
In the Western culture, those who are considered beautiful are more likely to get to places because beauty is valued (Millard, 2009, 150). The beautiful people are hen viewed more favorably compared to the average person, while every culture has a yardstick to conceptualize beauty, the Campaign for Real Beauty then recast the narrative focusing on realism in the advertising arena, and this alters the meaning of semiotic resources. In projecting beauty, both impression and performance are elements that define what is considered beautiful in a specific context (Millard, 2009, 149).
One of the remarkable effects of the ad was to create awareness about the new products in the market or all women. The company’s attempts to broaden the definition of beauty were successful in drawing interest from diverse quarters who were more interested on the company’s products. By drawing parallels between the company’s products and real beauty for the average woman, then more were likely to be persuaded to purchase the beauty products. Advertisers are effective when they make relevant connections with the strategy audience, where the embrace and respect diversify while reaching out to a board group of consumers (Drewniany & Jewler, 2013, p. 65).
After creating the initial buzz the choice women in the ads made it easier to spread the message about the company’s products as existing and potential customers get to know about the product they became more knowledgeable. This then started a global conversation, with the advertising campaign undertaken in diverse countries and relying on local women as the faces of the beauty campaigns. The creators of the Real Beauty Campaign noted that the conventional stereotypes of beauty had been overplayed by the media, while there were fewer images that made the average men feel deeply insecure about their body (Jeffers, 2005, p. 34).
Even after creating the initial buzz, the product might not perform well in the market. However, in the case of Dove the campaign sought to create a sense of credibility and this was associated with better rates of acceptance. As more women liked the product the company was well placed to expand operations globally based on a successful marketing campaign. Dove was successful in creating brand loyalty which was necessary for the company while expanding internationally. The goal of building brand loyalty was possible through linking...