DOVE: EVOLUTION OF A BRAND

Author: Thien Tran | December 2014.

Spend a little time searching blogs to get a sense of what people are/were

saying about Dove. What does this discussion contribute to the meaning of

the brand?

Dove is one of four hundred Unilever’s master brands after a winnowing down from

1,600 brands in 2000. In prior time, Dove’s marketing strategies aimed to address the

functional benefits of product which were “cleaning cream” and “moisturizing cream”.

However, when selected to be a master brand, Dove realized that those product’s core

values became standard or points of parity that most competitors within personal care

category communicated to target consumers on a regular basis. Therefore, the brand

embarked creating favourable points of difference by turning its communication

strategy from “functional benefits” to “a brand with consumers’ point of view” through

“Real Beauty” campaign. This leap raised public awareness of “self-esteem” and

redefining the meaning of “beauty”. Having read comments on many text-based and

video-based social networks, there were volumes of positive and negative feedback

generated by both ordinary audiences and experts. From my point of view, the

discussion somehow contributes to the success of brand in terms of brand community,

brand repositioning, brand identity, and brand building and development.

In 2006, Dove produced a 112-second films which was not aired on TV instead video-

sharing websites where people freely contribute their voice, subscribe and share to their

friends. Dove understood everything has both pros and cons, but its strategy was to

CASE STUDY ANALYSIS

make full use of virtual world to build up brand community in which membership,

influence, integration, fulfilment of needs, and shared emotion connection were main

elements to make a buzz for brand as a whole or for the “real beauty” campaign in a

smaller scale. Since those who got involved in this virtual conversation were considered

opinion leaders of key influencers to share the campaign message and their emotions to

their acquaintances. The more people shared and mentioned about the campaign, the

higher connection level of brand-consumer and product-consumer that Dove got.

Clearly, brand community plays a crucial role to consumers as psychologically everyone

wants to be well-recognized and part of a group by raising their voice on a certain issues,

and they gradually connect to the brand, and naturally became its loyal consumers, even

they did not realize that. In addition, By freely letting the community lead the

conversation, the repeat of “Dove” and “Real Beauty” would gradually increase the

brand awareness and turn it to be “top of mind” (TOP) to consumers perception

regardless negative or positive concerns. The higher TOP a brand gets the larger market

share it probably gets in return.

As previously mentioned, “cleaning cream” and “moisturizing cream” were common

attributes of person care category. To predominate over the competitors, Dove as a

master brand needed to create point of differences which would position Dove at

unordinary place in consumers’ mind. Dove did not follow the category structure in

terms of functional benefits, but the brand combined reserve and breakaway positioning

which eliminated all necessary attributes of original product and offered value

proposition. This seemed to be a smart push and pull communication strategy as on one

hand Dove used “real beauty” campaign to push the message to the public, but then

brand pulled consumers to get involved in conversation to let them redefine “personal

care” category on the other hand. This repositioning strategy enabled Dove to create a

strong brand identity and high level of loyalty to target consumers. Also, it strengthened

its competitive advantage over competitors within the same category.

Last but not least, positive and negative opinions on social network were valuable to

brand in terms of brand building and brand development. It is obvious that the

consumers would slightly speak out their deep thought about the brand, which could be

good or bad. Based on these conversations, Dove might capture consumer insight which

they could use for product development of marketing strategies in the long-term.

Footnote 1 of the case leads you to a blogger who asks, with reference to the

age of YouTube advertising, “Is marketing now cheap, fast and out of

control?” Footnote 2 refers to Dove as having started a conversation “that

they don’t have control of.” In “When Tush comes to Dove”, Seth Stevenson

writes about the “risky bet that Dove is making.” Do you see risks for the

Dove brand?

After reading these articles, I just agreed with these authors to some extents and did not

think it was a risk for Dove. I totally agreed that advances in technology enable

information exchange among individuals to become faster and more proactive. Social

media has broken down all geographical barriers to form a virtual society in which

individual freely to interact with others to share their emotions and receive as much

information as they want. Everyone in such communities usually has many of friends, so

one they reach an interesting message sent by marketer, they will probably decode and

share it thought their networks. As a result, the message reaches target consumer faster

and more convinced as it is sent by someone who are in relationship with each others. In

this way, I do not think marketing is cheap as it completely depends on brand’s

marketing strategy. In this case, Dove wanted to get audiences participated in the

dialogue as much as possible to make a buzz for the campaign in general. Its strategy

was to use the ordinary to highlight the extraordinary. Clearly, the models appeared on

the ads were normal people, so to make it approachable and acceptable to start the

conversation, Dove went with Youtube instead TV. Unlike other channels, in addition,

youtube is more cost-effective and able to refine target audience efficiently; especially it

allows users to interactively share the viral clips to their peers. In is fact that, the

language among peers is always understandable, so Dove took advantage of their

relationship to consolidate the credibility of “Real Beauty”. As the result, those who

resent the clip or got involved in conversation gradually became the brand endorsers.

Furthermore, every message always brings values to a certain group, so I think that

Dove did not take risk as the brand mission was to convince target consumers regardless

negative feedback stemming from non-target segment. Simply, the more people got

involved the more brand awareness increased Using fat models to transmit a message of

“real beauty” received lots of criticism. Many people thought that photo shop devalued

the ads’ efficiency whereas the brand focused on “real beauty”. In addition, when

looking at the billboard with fat and normal women, the consumers confused about

brand message. They did not know whether the modes’ weights were standard of beauty

or real beauty meant they should satisfy with who they are.