In Olivia Krieger’s blog post she comes to the conclusion that the effectiveness of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty ads is limited because the company is under the umbrella of Unilever – the company with “arguably the most degrading ads towards females on TV.” What Olivia fails to recognize is that Unilever follows in the example of Taiwan’s Quanta industries, a company that manufactures computer products for competing computer companies, including Dell, Compaq, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, and Siemens. In the mind of the consumer the fact that all of the computer brands are manufactured by the same company is irrelevant and, quite frankly, invisible. The target audience is different and neither audience is likely to care about the “guts” behind the brand. For example, Apple’s target market includes a younger clientele who want efficiency, easy socialization, and a light-weight product. In contrast, IBM’s target is the business market. Each company targets its marketing campaign towards a different target audience, and each uses a product manufactured by a company that few if any of the end users have ever heard of. Just as Dove appeals to self-conscious young women and axe appeals to hormone-infused young males, the ads reflect the difference in demographic, neither of which is likely to care about the corporate entity behind the products they use. The two brands might stem from the same company, but in the mind of the consumer they are two separate entities and thus the actions of one does not affect the other.

Image Citation:

http://laurahamilton.theworldrace.org/?filename=same-same-but-different