Marketing in the News-Dove's Reverse Selfie Campaign

    The Dove reverse selfie campaign was an ad I remember seeing in the past, but hadn't paid much attention to as it didn't relate to me. As I was searching for ideas on this assignment, I came across once again, and decided to look into it. After reading more about the campaign, I decided to use it for the fact that I believe the message they are portraying is accurate, and I think it was a perfect marketing play by Dove, showing that they truly understand their product, and the why of their product as well.

https://www.sookio.com/blog/dove-reverse-selfie-the-anatomy-of-a-campaign-dpwyrh (Link to article)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2T-Rh838GA (Video promoting the ad campaign).

https://www.dove.com/us/en/home.html (Dove home page)

  I suppose I can start off with what Dove is, I'm sure most everyone knows who they are, but just incase someone doesn't use or know of their product, Dove creates hygiene products for men and women, these include: deodorant, shampoo, body wash, an assortment of lotions, etc. The video Dove produced in a video of a young girl starting out with a doctored picture of herself with lots of photoshop, as the video plays it reverses the process of what the young teen did to get to the point of where she felt comfortable posting a picture of herself(covering up acne, making her skin tanner, making her lips bigger, etc.).The idea behind the reverse selfie campaign was to encourage parents of young teen girls to be themselves, and to make parents aware of the editing of photos that may cause their daughter to develop insecurities and false ideas of what they believe they should look like. Dove posted many impactful statistics on the matter, the most prevalent being that by the age of 13, nearly 80% of girls in someway edit their public photos on social media platforms. This marketing campaign truly is genius in today's market where there is a large social push to change beauty standards to a more realistic standard, and the way they target helping youth looks great for the branding as well. I have to imagine their thought process behind it was that it was something they truly did recognize as an issue, and they knew they would get free publicity from others(actors, celebrities, other companies) who want to look like they support and promote all of the disenfranchised people out there. Dove got celebrities' such as Lizzo to join and promote their cause, Lizzo being a popular singer who pushes the beauty standards of weight and body shapes.

    I believe the value proposition of Dove would be high quality hygiene products that allow you to feel comfortable in your own skin, and should make you feel okay with who you are, no matter what you think others may think of you. It is obvious with this ad campaign that they aren't a fancy and high end product that wants to tailor to the upper echelon of people, but want to market to the average person, and make them feel like their product will get them to feel they way they want to feel.

    I touched on the marketing relevance earlier in my summary when I mentioned the recent social pushes on the acceptance of all bodies and the way people look. I do believe that Dove did a fantastic job identifying an important subject, being that most people would agree that you shouldn't be worrying about every physical flaw you have, let alone a 13 year teenager who isn't even close to growing into the person they will become. Overall, Dove did a great job of identifying a sensitive topic most people can get behind, it makes them look relatable and attractive to the average person, or customer.

    I'm sure Dove has faced many internal challenges in the past, but in the case of this campaign, I believe they are just trying to tackle what they see as an important social issue, while also getting some great PR from the process.

    This marketing technique from Dove isn't necessarily unique, as many companies will tackle social issues for a PR, but I will say it is slightly more rare that a company will solely focus on the issue presented with little screen time on their company, in the video that Dove produced, it had nothing to do with the products they produce, the only thing shown was their logo at the end. Overall, I felt the ad production/campaign was high quality and well thought out by Dove, they did a great job of promoting their why, the inner part of their golden circle, and they truly portrayed what mattered to them which resonated well with the public. My research on this ad campaign has reinforced the idea of the importance of understanding your why, and how you might go about portraying it(and that it truly does matter how people see you/what they think of you).

    Something I may have considered if I was Dove would have been to maybe portray how we go about talking to our youth, like a simple clip of a parent chatting with their child, or maybe even real life scenarios where you bring in real parents and children that had already been through this in their personal lives.

    I will say as a whole, I think Dove did a great job of identifying who their market is, and then exploiting what they thought was important to that audience to get them to further promote Dove products. I couldn't think of another word besides exploit which feels like poor word choice, but I mean it in a way that Dove understands what their market cares about. 

    If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Can't wait to see all the other ad campaigns people found.