The Dove Campaign 1
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty:
The Beautiful and the Ugly
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The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty: The Beautiful and the Ugly
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty launched amid worldwide fanfare in 2004 with the purported aim of expanding definitions of female beauty and thereby reversing the negative effects the beauty industry has wrought on women’s self-image across the globe. Since its inception, the Dove Campaign has received international acclaim, winning a host of prestigious awards, including the Cannes Lions honors, and garnering relentless celebratory media attention across an array of fronts, from television news to radio to social media. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, however, and in the face of unprecedented success comes the stark reality that all is not as rosy with the campaign as may appear at first blush. Though the campaign has proven to be one of the most honored and well-known media campaigns in modern history, critics assert that the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty in many ways affirms and reiterates the very images it claims to reject. Through the use of feminist disability and social comparison theories, then, it becomes apparent that while the Dove Campaign does, indeed, expand the definition of beauty for some women, it does not do so for all. For those excluded by the Dove Campaign, the damage can be just as significant as that wrought by the traditional beauty industry, with its narrow, rigid, and excluding standards of beauty.
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was launched in 2004 by Dove’s parent company, Unilever, in an effort to revive its faltering line of beauty and hygiene products. The campaign was the product of a research study which found that less than 2% of women worldwide considered themselves beautiful (Bahadur, 2014, n.p.). Unilever seized upon this profound insight as a means to rebrand the Dove product line as one in which the focus was neither on the perpetuation of damagingly unrealistic standards of beauty deriving from the beauty industry nor on the cross commercialism of the endless pursuit of ever-rising profits. Rather, Unilever sought to rebrand the Dove product line as one which, first and foremost, represented an appreciation and a concern for “real” women, an acknowledgement of their unique beauty and a desire to foster in them a positive self-image. To achieve these laudable goals, the Dove Campaign launched a worldwide, multimedia initiative, one focused on women’s stories and their self-esteem, one in which images, videos, and narratives of women of all walks of life were not only represented but celebrated. These were not the blond-haired, blue-eyed waifs of the American heartland or the buxom brunette goddesses of the Latin world. These were real women, of all ages, races, shapes, and sizes. And they were all presented as they “naturally” were in daily life—no team of stylists, makeup artists, and hairdressers, and no tricks of lighting or photo editing. Dove’s purported intention was to represent women, all women, and to recognize what true beauty is, as opposed to the idealized and largely fictitious image the beauty industry advances as both a norm and a requirement.
Social Comparison Theory and the Dove Campaign
One of the most powerful attributes of effective advertising is through the operations of social comparison theory, which, as Pounders, Babin, and Close (2015), exerts a powerful impact on consumer behavior. According to the tenets of social comparison theory, an individual’s self-image is influenced most strongly by those whom the viewer perceives to be similar in some way to him or her. The impact of social comparison seems to be particularly strong within the beauty industry, which uses social comparison to market an ideal image of beauty by presenting models which are similar enough to the target consumer for her to identify with, yet idealized enough to inspire a sense of personal dissatisfaction in the viewer, a dissatisfaction which the beauty industry can claim to satisfy or remedy through the use of whatever product it happens to be marketing at the moment.
An important example of this tension between identification and the lack thereof is in the so-called “internalization of the thin ideal.” Harriger, Calogero, Witherington, and Smith (2010) studied this phenomenon, in which exposure to mass media, and particularly to images presented via the beauty industry, is equated with poor self-image and, in particular, with dissatisfaction in regard to body weight. The result is the acceptance of an unrealistic image bot of beauty and of “normalcy” which is centered in the thin ideal, the belief that body types which are, in fact, underweight—or worse—are the only desirable standard, a standard against which the viewer suffers by comparison.
The Dove Campaign, however, purports to reverse the negative impacts of social comparison by presenting models who are not only identifiable enough for consumers to compare themselves with but against whom “real” women can compare themselves favorably because both the models and the viewers are precisely that—real. They are the products neither of the photo editor nor of the surgeon’s scalpel. These are women with lines and wrinkles, with sags and bags, with gray hair and cellulite. Despite its admirable claims, however, detractors assert that the campaign in many ways reinforces the negative images it seeks to reject, particularly in regard to the idea that a woman’s self-worth is or should be bound to the concept of the beautiful. This, for detractors, perpetuates the sexist assumption that a women’s identity is defined by her appearance, even if she is the one to do the defining. This concern with women’s appearance, even if the concern is centered on how she herself views her own appearance, is an age-old sexist trope that suggests that there is little more to a woman tan her outward appearance and that this, above all else, is, or should be, her primary concern.
Feminist Disability Theory
Perhaps the most devastating criticism to be leveled against the Dove Campaign comes from feminist disability theory. From this standpoint, as Heiss (2011) shows, the Dove Campaign is egregiously deficient, because, despite its claims to inclusivity and acceptance, a large proportion of female embodiment is excluded from th Dove Campaign. Odell (2010) details te rigorous screening criteria by which the Dove campaign selects the “real women” to appear in the campaign ads. These women, Odell agues, are to have flawless skin, skin unmarred and unblemished, including by scars. These prohibitions, however, seem to be only the tip of the iceberg, because disabled women are almost wholly absent from the campaign. There are few women in the ads who have a visible physical disability and none which are featured prominently, as a central model or focus of any of its print ads or video narratives.
The failure to feature visibly disabled women in its ads is simply on of te more significant examples of the narrowness of this ostensibly egalitarian campaign. Further, because this campaign celebrates itself as one which includes, embraces, and celebrates all women, any woman who finds herself outside of those parameters—of which there are millions worldwide—is doubly excluded. This risks exerting an even more damaging influence than do the beauty industry’s idealized and largely unattainable standards. When an organization or entity claims to include everyone, then anyone not included in that group can, all too easily, begin to feel like no one at all.
Conclusion
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is one of the most successful global campaigns in the history of modern marketing. Driven by an effort to revive Unilever’s struggling beauty and hygiene product lines, the campaign is purportedly intended to reverse the often devastating impacts of the beauty industry’s idealized and unattainable standard of beauty. However, despite the wide-spread acclaim, attention, and honors the campaign has received since its launch in 2004, the ugly truth is that the campaign itself is not without blemish. Social comparison theories illustrate the powerful impact images of someone perceived to be similar to oneself can have, driving not only a consumer’s behavior, but also shaping his/her self-image. However, as feminist disability theories have shown, not all forms of embodiment are included in the campaign, despite its lofty claims to inclusivity. Visibly disabled women are largely excluded from the campaign, but this is just one example of the omissions made by this ostensibly inclusive initiative, an omission which can have even more harmful effects than can the traditional standards the Dove campaign presumes to reject.
References
Bahadur, N. (21 January 2014). Dove ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign turns 10: How a brand tried to change the conversation about female beauty. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from
Harriger, J. A., Calogero, R. M., Witherington, D. C., & Smith, J. E. (2010). Body sizestereotyping and internalization of the thin ideal in preschool girls. Sex Roles, 63, 609-620.
Heiss, S. N. (2011). Locating the bodies of women and disability in definitions of beauty: An analysis of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31. Retrieved from
Odell, A. (2010, June 28). Dove seeks women with ‘flawless skin’ and ‘no scars’ for itsnext real beauty campaign. New York Magazine. Retrieved from
Pounders, K, Babin, B., & Close, A. (2015). All the same to me: Outcomes of aesthetic labor performed by frontline service providers. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(6), 670-693.