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 memorabl...