THE CAMPAIGN THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE

Hello readers! How are you all doing? I really hope you are doing great and enjoying our first posts in this classroom blog.

 

Today I’ll be talking about brands and campaigns. Surely all of us are aware of what marketing or communication campaigns are; brands and companies use them to promote their products and to attract their target. The main objective of advertising is communicating the advantages of what is being sold, so that the consumer can find the product useful and valuable. 

But nowadays, spots and any other kind of marketing campaign in general aim to achieve and deeper connection with prospect customers and, also, to settle the brand’s image as they want it to be perceived. 

Campaigns are clearly an excellent way to create brand awareness and to reinforce the corporate strategy towards the market.

In the past, campaigns and all kind of commercial actions weren’t as important as right now, this is due to that in our days if you don’t have media presence you are over, because you won’t reach the audience and you will fail to stay in customer’s mind. But this also causes the saturation of information that we currently experiment, that implies an overexposure to advertising messages. Studies show that an average human receives an advertising impact every 10 seconds, what leads to 6.000 impacts per day.

 

 

Moving on to a deeper analysis of the topic, I’m going to comment one of the most remarkable campaigns that have been carried out for the past years.

Under the name of the “Real Beauty” campaign, by Dove. 

It was a worldwide campaign that took place in 2004 with the aim of building self-confidence mainly for women, but also for little girls. The creative idea was developed by Ogilvy & Mather, one of the largest and most recognized advertising agencies in the world and took 3 years to carry out the necessary strategic research to approach the target’s needs and preferences. The results of this were a completely different kind of advertising strategy that required a consumer-centric approach versus the classical product-centric advertising strategy that used to be so popular in those days.

It was considered one of the top 5 campaigns of the century and doubled the brand’s sales (from 2 billion dollars to 4 billion dollars) in only 3 years. 

 

Within this campaign Dove settled a new brand essence with the focus on “making women feel comfortable in the skin they are in, to create a world where beauty is a source of trust and not anxiety ". This new corporate strategy, that implies certain values and commitments, must be followed for all the actions made by the brand, as the content must be aligned to convey that it is a consistent brand broadcasting a strong and clear message.

The campaign was composed of several actions, starting from the initial indication that only 2% of women consider themselves beautiful. 

During the first stage of the campaign there was a focus on multiple billboard adverts, which showed photographs of ordinary women (instead of professional top models. These advs invited citizens to vote if the model was (for example) "fat or fabulous" and the results appeared updated on the billboard itself. Doing this, Dove was aiming “to create a new definition of beauty” that would empower women to feel free embracing their true own beauty.

The media coverage received was huge, ranging from talk shows to mainstream news broadcasts, and the campaign kept growing with television and print adverts such as the popular "Tested on Real Curves” and even appearing in the commercial break during Super Bowl XL.

 

Font: Dove content

 

In the following years the company looked for an extension, taking the campaign further away and developing other actions such as creating more viral videos like “Daughters”, which was a film addressing the self-esteem problems that girls are likely to find during her life due to the beauty pressure and the high beauty standards in society. This piece was followed by many other video contents such as “Evolution” or Onslaught, being this second one a very emotional representation of the impacts that the beauty industry has on teenage girls.

The campaign was kept alive, emerging communicative actions periodically.

It was in April 2013 when Dove Real Beauty Sketches was successfully published and attracted the media and target’s attention again. It was a video where a forensic cartoonist drew women without seeing them and guided only by the description that each one of them did on herself. Next, they were described by strangers they had previously met and both results are compared afterwards. The outcome was showed to the participants, and they were completely different sketches, because women would describe themselves in a poorer way, while strangers saw them much more praising and accurate. The whole campaign was a masterpiece.

The last linked action was developed years later, concretely in 2017, Dove created some limited-edition versions of shower gel bottles meant to look like different body shapes.

 

Font: Dove’s website

 

 

After all this track, personally, it amazes me how they were able to find a topic that would join all women around the world, no matter what their skin color, body shape or size are. And the way the brand has assumed all these values to the core, developing a strong social commitment and a brand essence that leaves the product itself in the background.

I’ve named this post “The campaign that made a difference” in a two-sided way. Because I think that it really made a difference in society and achieved the goal of helping all women by making them much more empowered and aware of themselves. But also, because I think that Dove changed the way advertising campaigns, in general, would be focused then onwards. A new approach was established, and it placed the customer in the center, instead of talking about the products benefits and I think that this was the real achievement that the brand made.

This is all for today's post. Have you liked it? What do you think about the whole campaign? 

I'm looking forward to read your comments!

*(the spots mentioned during the entry are linked to the brand's YouTube videos in case you would like to see them; you can find them in the words in bold and underlined)