Many businesses credit their success to long-term finance, marketing, strategy, or management. However, business is an unpredictable world with some of the greatest gains and losses happening in a very short period of time. In fact, just this week, Dove essentially destroyed their entire 10 year-long campaign in just 3 seconds.
A new advert released on social media on October 6th portrayed a black woman turning into a white woman, as shown below. This picture went viral very quickly as many people believed it was highly offensive to people of colour and a direct attack against Dove’s very own campaign. Many were reminded of similar racist soap ads in the 19th century where black people were depicted washing themselves and turning white. Dove quickly removed their ad from Facebook and publicly apologized over Twitter saying they “missed the mark in representing woman of color thoughtfully”.
Source: Toronto Star
One thing to consider about this ad is that the picture that went viral doesn’t show the full story. The full ad portrays the white woman turning into an Asian woman and then the ad repeats itself. The original ad was 13 seconds long with a 30 second ad on TV. Clearly, Dove did not intend to post a racist ad, rather they released perhaps the greatest marketing failure of 2017. Dove likely wanted to show how woman of all types and colour were equally beautiful as has been their campaign for a significant period of time. Despite this, with the first few seconds of the ad taken out of context, the damage was done with #DonewithDove trending on Twitter in multiple languages showing a significant movement to boycott the company.
What’s interesting about the ad was that the original black actress, Lola Ogunyemi, defended the company stating her time on set was “positive” and how “all of the women in the shoot understood the concept and overarching objective – to use [their] differences to highlight the fact that all skin deserves gentleness”. Regardless of how the ad was taken out of Dove’s original context, it’s very easy to see how this ad could have been very racist, so how did it pass through all the edits before release? Some attribute this to a lack of diversity in the workplace, something so crucial to large businesses around the world. Others say that there was a lack of consumer research and focus on downstream marketing as we learned about in class 11. Whatever the answer may be, it’s shocking that Dove would miss the mark so much and not see an issue with the ad before posting it. 3 seconds was all it took for Dove’s marketing team to damage the brand for years to come.
Source: CNBC
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