The Campaign for Real Honesty

Earlier this year, as part of one of my MBA electives, I spent some time looking closely at Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. The campaign, originated in the UK but now used around the world, encourages women to look at beauty in a different way. They use 'real' women - still very attractive, but with curves, or wrinkles, or grey hair. According to Dove's marketing materials, the campaign is meant to challenge stereotypes, "to celebrate the diverse, the healthy, the real, the truly beautiful."

Taken at face value, the Dove message is uplighting and welcome in an age where so many young women face crippling body image issues. And the company seems to walk the talk, creating a foundation to help boost esteem in young girls. All the same, our group was curious what women thought of the campaign. Was the idea of real beauty attractive?

Overall, the women we spoke to like the campaign. Some loved it -- and said they would buy Dove products because of it -- others liked the message but weren't as ready to change their buying habits. We didn't discover anything particularly earth-shattering. Until one of the participants in one of the sessions told us a friend had told her not to buy anything by Unilever. The reason, she said, was all about Axe.

Axe, like Dove, is a Unilever product. At the time of our discussion, the Axe ad campaign revolved around young men who found that Axe could make them irresistable to women. The women in question were almost anamatronic. Stick thin and expressionless, the women were objects in every sense. The campaign, like the Dove campaign, seemed perfectly suited to the target demographic. The problem, our participant explained, was the utter contradiction between the two efforts. Dove told women they should embrace their own unique, if imperfect, beauty. Yet the Axe campaign used the very types of unachievable 'beauty' that Dove seemed to want to eliminate.

When Axe was mentioned in the focus groups there was unanimous agreement that the ads were offensive to women. When the women were told that Unilever makes both Dove and Axe, the negative reaction was immediate. The women who had been most positive about Dove reacted most extremely. They were horrified, and felt that they had been lied to. They felt duped.

I'm not sure I would go so far. It is just advertising, after all. But Unilever may want to think about the backlash. By tieing Dove to esteem and real beauty, they set an expectation for who they are as a company. It is therefore incumbent upon the parent company to hold all their brands to a higher standard. I'm not saying to ax Axe - just give the women in the commercials a brain and a voice. Some guys may even be into that.