Dove’s gender-empowerment ad stunt goes pear-shaped
After years of encouraging women to love their bodies, Dove set out to give its plastic bottles a makeover. The idea: “Just like women, we wanted to show that our iconic bottle can come in all shapes and sizes, too,” the company said on its website.
After just hours of its new advertising campaign, it seems indignation comes in all shapes and sizes, too.
The six shapely bottles — which include curvy, slender and pearshaped varieties — have attracted ridicule from all corners.
“Dove ruined its body image,” the Atlantic declared.
“Dove is running out of ideas,” the women’s site Jezebel added.
Consumers were quick to weigh in on social media, too: “Like, I just want to (use) my body wash, not be reminded that I’m pear-shaped,” a woman named Julie Daniel tweeted. “Women don’t need to be categorized all the time.”
So exactly where did Dove, a longtime darling of the advertising world, go wrong? For starters, advertising professors say, the revamped bottles seem more tongue-in-cheek than they do a sincere way of celebrating women’s bodies. And, they said, there is a difference between feeling comfortable in your body and being prodded to make buying decisions based on your body’s contours.
“It’s straight-up off-brand,” said Samantha Skey, president of digital media company She Knows Media. “It’s a change in tone for Dove, from ads that are almost painfully sincere and earnest, to something that could literally be a Saturday Night Live skit. Unless you’re trying to mock every- thing you stand for, I’m not sure why you would do this.”
Dove and its parent company, Unilever, did not respond to requests for comment. Executives at Ogilvy & Mather London, the advertising firm behind the campaign, called it “one of those rare ideas which condenses decades of a brand’s legacy in two seconds.”
“It’s deceivingly simple and quite nuanced,” Andre Laurentino, an executive creative director for Ogilvy, said in a statement. “A message about our body conveyed by Dove bottles themselves, it brings brand essence and product design seam- lessly together.”
But not everybody seemed to agree. Consumer surveys show shoppers choose soaps and body washes based on a number of factors, including scent, quality and affordability. And while packaging plays a role in how a product is perceived, many said Dove’s campaign missed the point.
“When you’re shopping, you’re not going to say, ‘Oh, wow, I’m going to buy this one because it has a pear shape just like me,’ ” said Angeline Close Scheinbaum, an advertising professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies consumer psychology. “It doesn’t seem like this was a woman’s idea.”
For more than a decade, Dove’s “real beauty” campaign has been hailed as an example of socially conscious advertising. Now, Dove is left doing damage control. But, Skey and others said, this slip-up isn’t likely to cause much long-term damage to the brand. As Skey put it: “This kind of brand fail, they happen to everybody. You can only have a winning strategy for so long before you push it too far.”