Dove's Advertising Campaign Critical Essay

Introduction

Advertisements play a significant responsibility in today's society; wherever you go, you will get products being advertised on billboards, online and social media platforms, or televisions. They tend to be the most potent and creative forms of arguments nowadays. Adverts are designed to take the consumers money and time. The primary role of an advertisement is to get the viewers attention urging them to purchase the embodied products or services. The other is to endorse the store name while it visually forms an image of the organization. Dove, a brand under Unilever, launched an advert that saw their revenue rise rapidly and at the same time improve self-confidence among women and young girls through the 'Real Beauty' Campaign.

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Background

Advertising has its roots in the branding of bricks by ancient Egyptian bricklayers. The advancement of advertising was made possible by the advent of new consumer affluence, literacy rates, and printing tools that contributed to mass circulation radio programs, magazines and newspapers (Rust & Oliver1994, p. 73). The changes in technology have resulted in consumers being empowered in information and dramatically shifting the influence in the marketplace in their favor. Developed vendors such as Wal-Mart can now dictate supply patterns and also regulate the records of producers. Today, the retailer has turned out to be the market agent of the buyers and not the manufacturers.

Dove's Campaign

The Intention for the Advert

A great campaign is a sequence of related advertisements which reveal a story built on what has been sold before, develops the brand along the way, frequently provokes a direct action, lays the basis for a relationship, has an emotional attachment/response, and grows a sense of value in the consumers' minds. When we see an advert, most of us think deeper. We try to comprehend the reason for the elements or layout which create a greater message. The advertisement campaign I choose was of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty which was created in 2004 to change women's belief in the meaning of beauty. This campaign has been quite an achievement for the past thirteen years moving from a sole focus on adult women to addressing young girls self-esteem workshops in encouraging self-confidence (Johnston&Taylor2008, p. 951).

With its first appearance in the UK, the campaign for real beauty adverts portrayed women who did fit the traditional beauty perception. The women were full of flaws which were perceived as unappealing by the general society- they were either seen as fat, had stretch marks, pregnant, or freckled. Some of them were flat chested or had grey hair, and Dove claimed that all images in the campaign had no digital retouching(Johnston&Taylor2008, p. 952). These portrayals of 'real women' gained fame in the UK and quickly spread across Europe and to North America. In the current market, the campaign for real beauty is a basis for Dove's universal marketing strategies.

The over-definition of beauty by the society is one of the factors that contribute to women failing to address themselves as beautiful(Dye 2009, p. 118). Dove's campaign hence plays a role in addressing these matters and helping young girls and women to reclaim confidence in saying 'I am beautiful'; nevertheless, Unilever, which is Dove's parent company, runs other beauty brands that oppose the efforts of this drive such as the fair and lovely skin bleaching cream, Axe, and Slimfast. But then the company held the belief that dialogue contributes to brand preference which in turn provides brand loyalty; this could be what keeps Dove in the sales lead(Dye 2009, p. 120). Approach Taken by the Advert

The Dove drive entails four different but interconnected marketing segments. The initial stage involves the use of print media for publicity. The second one targets young women and makes use of television commercials. Third phase features older women in print adverts which concentrate explicitly on the fifty-plus age category. Lastly, is the most prominent phase which is the use of a video that went viral on social media platforms. The campaign for 'real beauty' has unusual steps in showing their loyalty to their efforts while helping the female gender in becoming aware of the extent of impact the media has in pressuring them to try and fit a particular image. In 2013, Dove created the 'Real Beauty Sketches' which is a social experiment for illustrating how women tend to be self-critical on their appearance(McCleary2014, p. 14). Dove strives to concentrate on finding a more diverse perception of what beauty is and attempting to make it something that is not so distinct from our self-perception.

The exertion of assessing one's situation and the notion of common sense assist in explaining how Dove has generated product constancy in their adverts. Not even one of the advertisements promoted by Dove's drive indicates the real value of the brand. Alternatively, through portraying curvy women showing their figures, or presenting emotional women after evaluating how diverse they view their exquisiteness compared to their friends, the brand arouses an optimal exploration, that links an incident to an act and makes things easier for making decisions in the consumer's mind (Johnston &Taylor 2008, p. 947). These ads then result in women questioning whether they are still attractive with their wrinkles and figures, hence living on the trouble of assessing one's appearance.

Some of the downsides of the 'Real Beauty Sketches' was that the sample group does not suitably represent the general population. It majorly features fairly young, white women who might be perceived as traditionally beautiful. Actually, during the 6.36 minutes advert, black women were only presented for ten seconds. Furthermore, the clip only concentrates on women's beauty by trying to promote the importance of beauty. Rather than having the people compliment one another on their outward looks, they ought to be judging them according to their dispositions(McCleary2014, p.16). These ads continue to maintain the idea that, when appraising other females or ourselves, exquisiteness is dominant, the objective should not be to get them focusing on their diverse exquisiteness (Dye 2009, p. 116). Instead, it ought to get them into doing for themselves what they feel the larger society should do: critic one another by ethical sensibility, wit, and intelligence, and not just their bodies and facial appearances.

Being aware that the campaign might face criticisms as a small marketing strategy, the people spearheading the Real Beauty campaign concluded that, merely discussing these problems was not adequate. The brand still feels like it holds responsibility in ongoing discussions on body image and beauty(McCleary2014, p. 4). Dove plans to continue producing videos similar to'Real Beauty Sketches.' Dove Canada through its Twitter handles #DovePositiveChange, shares inspiring discussions with women tweeting meek comments concerning themselves.

Lastly, the checkboxes which go with the original copy of the adverts is similar to ballots. Whether it was deliberate or not, in the ad's framework, the boxes invoke descriptions of women's suffrage and first wave feminism; this can be viewed as co-option of activist values which are used to market Dove products by linking the brand with themes of women's independence and liberation. For the brand, this campaign strategy was a win-win state: they could show concern with the best beauty ideals and at the same time recommend their products as beauty solutions. Furthermore, it permitted the firm to relate traditional beauty (proportionality, facial symmetry, thinness) with the Dove brand while encompassing aberrations such as grey hair and freckles which help in constructing brand loyalty and relatability. Nevertheless, this marketing strategy supports the beauty myth by stressing physical lure as the height of female success, as well as maintaining post-feminism by highlighting the physique as the primary source of female distinctiveness (McCleary 2014, p. 10).

Impact of Advertising

Advertisements do influence us a lot. The recognition of brand names, the food we consume, the clothes we wear, all reflects around most adverts. On the positive side, ads play a noteworthy role in the business sector. They give information that is useful to the consumers by increasing their understanding of the selection of products available to them(Jurca & Madlberger 2015, p. 48). Hence, they encourage the economic growth as well. For a message to be achieved, it ought to connect with the audience on an emotional level. A viewer who gets emotional after watching a video clip is bound to get encouraged to share it with peers or a person's of equal interests (Barry 2016, p. 112). The video on Real beauty Sketches directly hit the self-image and identity of women and girls by revealing to them the truth behind the beauty sector and raising their dignity in their internal beauty with less focus on the external beauty hence helping them generate a positive self-perception and keep off from fake beauties portrayed by the media.

Marketing and advertising have undermined women in several ways in that, if one was to judge the place of women in the society, exclusively by their representation in adverts, they might conclude that we are living in a community equal to 1950's America. Many adverts for cleaning products focus on women using them. By trying to empower buyers through co-opted elements of choice, Dove is hypothetically disempowering the women in their adverts whose bodies are now being scrutinized by the society (Dye 2009, p. 119). By endorsing the notion that women's bodies are objects to the public's judgment, Dove is conveying information which challenges their acknowledged campaign goals.

Televised commercials also contribute to environmental issues by encouraging wasteful use of natural resources. Buying items that we do not need, disposing of goods, and overpackaging, all result to wastage of inadequate resources (Barry 2016, p. 114). The production and dumping of the things we purchase result in other ecological issues, such as increased water and air pollution, and loss of habitat. Adverts also cost us financially. Companies transfer most of their cost on to us, the price of an item rises as well when adverts effectively nurture the impression that a particular product may portray a specific cool image or status (Twitchell, 2000 p. 95). Adverts can, therefore, be misleading since they focus on the profits of services and products and ignore the downsides. Through this, the number of US citizens with unstable financial states has risen steadily in recent years since they tend to spend money that they do not have on advertised products.

Ambient Advertising

In this period of a rising number of product campaign messages which are competing for the attention of consumers, it is turning out to be progressively hard for advertisers to pass their information efficiently. Ambient advertising might be the solution to improving the marketing confusion and subsequent deteriorating defiance toward advertising. In America, research has shown that close to half of the newspaper and magazine's pages are filled with adverts and about ten to fifteen minutes of a TV hour are devoted to advertisements (Jurca & Madlberger 2015, p. 48). Ambient advertising does not make use of dedicated media. Instead, it applies the physical surrounding as the medium.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have to admit that, as Dove says they have an aim of changing women's notion of exquisiteness, they primarily use our spending nature and uncertainties to waste money on their items. Worst of it all, these products have been clinically confirmed to...