Dove advertisement
Dove Ad clip
Dove’s history shows that that their mission is to make everyone that is using their products feel beautiful and to make their skin look radiant and healthy. They have been active in beauty and self esteem campaigns since 2004 trying to make people (mostly women) think more positive about themselves and hold confidence. Dove’s value proposition is for women to feel confident, beautiful, and strong in their own skin. Dove products are only used to enhance women's skin to be healthy and moisturized, not to change how the women look.
Dove had a new body wash campaign featuring women of all races taking their shirts off that were a nude color to their skin tone. The first woman to be shown was a black woman taking her dark toned shirt off and essentially turning into the next woman being a white woman taking her shirt off. The message that Dove was trying to get across is that even though all these women are different in their own ways, they all deserve to be treated with gentleness. The public completely misunderstood the message and perceived it as a racist advertisement because from the video it looked like the black woman washed herself with dove soap and then became lighter due to the following women having a lighter skin tone. Dove responded to the negative responses in a very apologetic way explaining how their intentions were to send a positive message of support to all the women reminding them that they are strong and beautiful and with using dove your skin and self esteem will glow.
The marketing issue with Dove’s advertisement was that the message was obviously not clear enough, there were a lot of gray areas where the public (in which they did) could take it out of context even though that wasn’t Dove’s intentions. What Dove did do though in order to fix their mess up, was listen to the public and what they had to say and take accountability for their actions.
In my opinion, I can see how the advertisement could come off as discriminatory but that wasn’t my first idea when seeing the video the first time. To me it looks like a group of women promoting Dove’s product and nothing else. I also can understand why people didn’t get the message because if I hadn’t read the articles on this ad I wouldn't have been able to depict what the message was either, but nor would I have thought of it as being racist. If I were the marketing manager, I don’t think I would have stretched my idea out as far as Dove did. I would have made it very recognizable about what the message was in order to eliminate all assumptions. Keeping Dove’s idea of having the women change their shirts, but adding a short caption somewhere on the video briefly explaining the message or giving a positive piece of advice for the viewers to take with them would have been beneficial and present a better understanding about the message.
A few questions to leave you with. When you first saw this video, what were your first thoughts about it? Without being told what this message was could you have understood what the ad was trying to get at?
The marketing issue with Dove’s advertisement was that the message was obviously not clear enough, there were a lot of gray areas where the public (in which they did) could take it out of context even though that wasn’t Dove’s intentions. What Dove did do though in order to fix their mess up, was listen to the public and what they had to say and take accountability for their actions.
In my opinion, I can see how the advertisement could come off as discriminatory but that wasn’t my first idea when seeing the video the first time. To me it looks like a group of women promoting Dove’s product and nothing else. I also can understand why people didn’t get the message because if I hadn’t read the articles on this ad I wouldn't have been able to depict what the message was either, but nor would I have thought of it as being racist. If I were the marketing manager, I don’t think I would have stretched my idea out as far as Dove did. I would have made it very recognizable about what the message was in order to eliminate all assumptions. Keeping Dove’s idea of having the women change their shirts, but adding a short caption somewhere on the video briefly explaining the message or giving a positive piece of advice for the viewers to take with them would have been beneficial and present a better understanding about the message.
A few questions to leave you with. When you first saw this video, what were your first thoughts about it? Without being told what this message was could you have understood what the ad was trying to get at?
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