By Julia Oller | Echo
Confession time: When I first watched Dove's viral YouTube video "Real Beauty Sketches," I admit I brushed a few tears off my face.
The film features an artist who draws ordinary women as they describe themselves before sketching them again as others describe them. Soft light illuminates teary-eyed women as they renounce their harsh opinions of their own external beauty. All of a sudden, they are transformed by an understanding of "Real Beauty," the name of Dove's ad campaign that began in 2004.
That's right. Dove is not producing these videos out of the goodness of its heart. This is an ad campaign, a fact that Unilever, Dove's mother corporation, hopes American women overlook in their desperation to be affirmed as truly beautiful. And so far they have: "Real Beauty Sketches" was the top viral video ad of 2013, with 4.24 million shares.
Hypersexualized American culture is playing right into Dove's hands, and their brilliantly paradoxical marketing strategy doesn't appear to be going anywhere soon. The more Dove can get people to buy into its definition of "Real Beauty," the more bars of soap and bottles of shampoo will fly off the shelves.
But Dove hasn't duped Jonathan Salem Baskin, an advertising guru and Forbes contributor whose motto is "I dare to uncover the surprising truths that drive successful brands." The "Real Beauty" campaign, he says, is nothing more than a marketing construct.
"They could have just as easily decided to celebrate the planets or playground sand," he said.
In fact, AXE, Dove's sister corporation, did celebrate the planets in its 2013 AXE Apollo campaign featuring astronauts and bikini-clad women. The female models didn't say much, but they didn't need to. Their Photoshopped bodies did all the talking. Where AXE is concerned, sexy sells.
Jump to the website of another Unilever brand, Tresemmé, and you'll immediately meet a smoldering woman with flawless skin and hair even Rapunzel would envy.
Unilever's ad campaign is a double standard: on one hand exploiting cultural norms and on the other defying them. Telling women they are beautiful while at the same time holding them up to an unattainable standard of beauty both serve to fulfill Unilever's bottom line: cold hard cash.
As long as the company makes a profit, Dove doesn't care what the buyer looks like. "Normal" females might not be gorgeous enough to model Tresemmé products, but as long as Dove's customers have cash to spend it doesn't matter if they look like Goldilocks or Medusa.
Baskin says that "branding isn't a series of promises, but an ongoing narrative." Until Dove does more to prove its promotion of "Real Beauty" than upload a few snazzy YouTube videos, I cannot fully support its efforts. Dove may be Unilever's long-time spouse, but brands like AXE and Tresemmé are its mistresses, exploiting cultural norms to undermine Dove's wholesome message.
Show me a company that actually sticks to its promise that "we're doing whatever it takes to put a stop to beauty-related anxieties" and I'll show you my pennies and dimes.
Dove currently partners with the Boys and Girls Club, Girls Inc. and the Girl Scouts of the USA to reach its goal of spreading a message of healthy body image to 15 million adolescents by 2015.
Although this vision seems admirable, the term "partner" is loose at best. Dove has developed its own curriculum of workshops and programs for young girls and uses its partnerships to distribute these materials nationwide. Given that these organizations are perfectly capable of putting on workshops of their own, Dove would be better served improving the lives of its own employees and their young daughters.
If Dove truly cares about "Real Beauty," the company doesn't have to set foot outside the Unilever family to positively change the female self-image. While AXE may never phase out its bathing beauties, it wouldn't hurt to pressurize the brand to tone down the editing or at least add a few articles of clothing to the models' bodies.
To steal a line from one of Dove's self-empowerment videos, "The power is in your hands": the power to see through Dove's marketing scheme and stand up for honest advertising.
"Real Beauty" doesn't come in a bottle; it comes from within.
(Thumbnail photograph courtesy of Dove.)
