Essay: beauty and the dove campaign

New Saviour or New Suppressor?

Tiffany Tong

November 15^th, 2006

Only 2% of [surveyed] women describe themselves as ‘beautiful’; almost one half of them think their weight is ‘too high’.

Dove Campaign for Real Beauty Website (“Dove”)

The above findings are from a Dove initiated survey of 3,200 women aged 18 to 64 from ten countries including the United States, Canada, and Japan (“Dove”). In response, Dove launched a new advertising campaign in which the city bloomed overnight to reveal eye-catching billboards. It turned heads not because of its stick-thin, sexy female models, but because of it featuring models with thick, round thighs and full stomachs that curve out instead of in. The different coloured women, in pure white underwear, laugh with their mouths wide open. Confident, natural, basic are the first words that come to mind.

Although the ad is targeted at females ranging from 18 to 35 (Kent) with no specific racial background, it is mostly for women, in westernized countries with obesity problems, who have enough money to buy luxury items. Statistics show that in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Britain, sales went up 11.4%, 6%, 30%, and 600% respectively after the launch of the ad (“Street Cents”; Kent).

Many credit this success to the ad’s message of freeing women from stereotypical beauty standards and empowering them to be their true self. Media critics such as Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine, and feminist author Ann Kearney-Cooke have applauded Dove’s effort to promote a positive change in social attitudes towards women (“Street Cents”). They claim it is time that women are represented more accurately in the media for seeing size zero models with perfect proportions, skin, and make up distorts the perception of beauty in society. Most rejoice in the success of this ad in improving self-esteem.

However, Stephen Mandy, a clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Miami stated none of the listed ingredients in the firming cream are shown to reduce cellulite (“Street Cents”). Also, on closer inspection, as Bob Garfield of Advertising Age said, the models, despite their apparent largeness, are “head turners with straight white teeth, no visible pores and not a sign of cellulite” (“Street Cents”). Is this a portrait of “real” women, as Dove claims? How can an ad that sells cellulite reducing agents known as firming creams tell its audiences to appreciate themselves just as they are? How can so many women miss this obvious paradox?

The truth is no form of advertising that can effectively increase product sales can simultaneously boost self-confidence. The reason lies in the nature of advertising. If an ad were to tell you that you are perfectly fine without its product, then why would you go out, spend money, and buy the product? Successful advertising always “presents two appeals: one that is congruent with our underlying, emotional reason for consuming a product, and another that reinforces our confabulated, consciously acceptable excuse for doing so” (Bullock 98). Taking this definition into consideration, the Dove firming cream ad uses four different techniques that target logic in the consciousness and insecurities in the unconsciousness.

Firstly for the conscious mind, the ad uses liberation marketing. Dove tells you, its audience, that they know normal life isn’t satisfying. They know you long to ‘be yourself”. Moreover, they understand women don’t like the contemporary standard of beauty. They know that “real women have real curves” (Dove). But there is hope! By using their firming cream, you can “[break] free from the old enforcers of order, [tear] loose from the shackles with which capitalism has bound us, [escape] the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, [and get] in touch with our true selves [to find] authenticity” (Frank). Likewise, by emphasizing that the models are “real” women with names and personalities (Dove), the ad implies that the models have the same worries and problems as the consumers, but once the product is used, everyone becomes beautiful and confident.

In addition, by being radically different in marketing approach and appearing to be a promoter of female liberation, Dove has attracted a lot of media coverage which reached many potential consumers that didn’t notice its ads before. This campaign has generated a lot of controversial views: some, as previously mentioned, support it one hundred percent; some, mostly men, view “heavy women in their underwear on billboards outside [their] living room windows”(“Street Cents”) as unsettling; some say the ad sends self-contradicting messages (“Street Cents”); some recognize it as a major improvement in the marketing industry (“Street Cents”) …and so on. These views have caused different types of media, that don’t normally concern their contents with ads, to publish reviews and analysis. As Jonah Bloom remarked, Dove “wanted to play to the pack-following newsrooms all over the country [for] it would give the campaign more media coverage than [Dove] could have bought with a decade’s worth of marketing.” (“Street Cents”).

Yet, although the techniques mentioned above were effective, they were also employed by many other ads that didn’t have the same level of success. Why? I believe it is because the real magic of the ad lies in its appeal to the unconscious mind of its consumers.

In a recent psychology study on female university students, surprising results were found: slightly heavy ad models might install a sense of insecurity in the audience (Smeesters and Mandel). The study showed that participants exposed to moderately thin models had higher appearance self-esteem than those exposed to moderately heavy models (Smeesters and Mandel), such as those in the Dove ads. Also, it has been shown that unconscious anxieties motivate consumers to buy products (Bullock 75). From the two results, one can infer that the firming cream ad builds on the social culture of “a model-thin body [being] considered an ideal that every woman should admire and achieve” (Wertheim et al qtd. in Smeesters and Mandel) to trigger insecurities that in turn prompt consumerism. The audience knows that society in general still view them as “fat,” with all the undesirable connotations (Sheehan 97). But since this notion stays unnoticed in their subconscious, it doesn’t affect the effect of liberation marketing. Although only university students were experimented on, the results should pertain to a wider age range because the subconscious is primitive and alters little with age (Bullock 35).

Additionally, this ad is only a repackaged form of the old cliché of “sex sells” that is geared towards women (Rutledge Shields and Heinecken 74). Generally, women in western societies desire to be sexually favoured because they live under what feminist scholars call the “male gaze,” which is an “implied approval by an often invisible male spectator.”(Rutledge Shields and Heinecken 73) As the models in the ad are so free and confident, it is implied that the male spectator approves of them, and by buying the firming cream, the consumer’s beauty or appearance will also be approved.

Women are the perfect targets for this Dove firming cream ad. They, unlike men, “not only evaluate the primary message” of the ad, but also unconsciously examine “multiple clues from the message …and infer the inner meaning.” (Sheehan 92) As a result, their unconscious desire is more easily activated, which may result in individuals responding by buying the product to fulfill their desire because they “confuse the true nature of a product … [with an] ad-induced description” (J. Fitzsimons et al). In this case, the Dove firming cream ad is greatly successful because of its many layers of cues that trigger the audience’s deepest fears of being unaccepted by society and motivate them to buy the cream to improve their appearance. The Dove campaign for real beauty is but another incorporation, meaning that it still “adheres to traditional patriarchal conventions of advertising” (Rutledge Shields and Heinecken 48).

I hope that next time when you have the impulse to buy another consumer product, please take a minute and recall that advertising’s major objectives are to make people feel they are “not a unified being…but instead a work in progress made up of separate parts, each in need of continual improvement.” (Rutledge Shields and Heinecken 79) The ads are telling us that the product provides a “solution to our problems” and a “hope that we can move closer to the ideal… and as a consequence be happy: (Rutledge Shields and Heinecken 79). Advertisements are but a mirror in which we see a reflection of “both what we really are, and what we would like to think we are” (Bullock 56). By buying the product and feeling satisfied because of the purchase, we are giving in to the companies that are pretending to be progressive, yet, are still manipulating our minds.

Works Cited

Bullock, August. The secret sales pitch: an overview of subliminal advertising. San Jose: Norwich Publishers, 2004.

Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. 2006. Unilever. November 15, 2006 < http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com>.

Dove Firming Products. Advertisement. November 15, 2006 < http://sweetchillisauce.com/Photos2/Dove.jpg>

Frank, Thomas. Liberation Marketing and the Culture Trust. November 15, 2006 < www.casualarts.net/Liberation%20Marketing.pdf>

J. Fitzsimons, Gavan, J. Wesley Hutchinson, and Patti Williams. “Non-Conscious Influences on Consumer Choice.” Marketing Letters. 13:3 (2002): 269-279.

Kent, Melissa. ” Dove’s figures soar as ‘real women’ give beauty a new face.” The West Australian Oct. 6, 2005.

Rutledge Shields, Vickie, and Dawn Heinecken. Measuring Up: How Advertising Affects Self-image. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

Sheehan, Kim. Controversies in Contemporary Advertising. California: Sage Publications, Inc., 2004.

Smeesters, Dirk, and Naomi Mandel. “Positive and Negative Media Image Effects on the Self” Journal of Consumer Research. 32 (2006): 576-582.

“Street Cents: Behind the Hype: Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign.”  CBC. Episode 02. 2006. November 14, 2006 <http://www.cbc.ca/streetcents/guide/2005/02/

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