Index: Dove: Evolution of A Brand

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WRITTEN ANALYSIS OF CASE -

DOVE: EVOLUTION OF A BRAND

Submitted by Group Number - 4

● V Sathvika Sharma (19021141130)


● Sumitra Saha (19021141118)
● Binish Siddiqui (19021141032)
● Prerona Dey (19021141078)

INDEX
Serial Number Particulars Page Number

1 Dove as a brand and its 3


competitors

2 Mergers and Acquisitions 3

3 Point of View 3

4 Role of Media 4

5 Public Relations 4

6 Market Positioning 4

7 Organizing for Product 5

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Category Management

8 Brand Management 6

9 Brand Structure and 6


Control

10 Brand Mission 7

11 Challenges 7

12 Strategies and Solutions 8

13 Contribution to the 9
Meaning of the Brand

14 Conclusion 9 - 10

DOVE AS A BRAND AND ITS COMPETITORS

● Dove was a brand with its origins in the U.S. in the post-World War II era.
● The first Dove product, called a beauty bar, was launched in 1957 with the claim that it
would not dry out your skin the way soap did.
● The 1957 launch advertising campaign for Dove gave a message that Dove soap doesn’t
dry your skin because it's one-quarter cleansing cream.
● In 2007, Unilever’s Dove was the world's number one “cleansing” brand in the health and
beauty sector.
● Dove was tapped to become a Masterbrand in Feb 2000. No longer could Dove
communicate mere functional superiority. Instead, Dove should stand for a point of view.
● It competed in categories that included cleansing bars,body washes, hand washes, face
care, hair care, deodorants, anti-perspirants, and body lotions.
● It competed with brands like P&G’s Ivory, Kao’s Jergens, and Beiersdorf’s Nivea.

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RESULT OF MERGER

Dove’s parent company Unilever was formed in 1930 as a result of merger between U.K. based
Lever Brothers and Dutch Margarine Unie.
It was a logical merger since both companies depended on palm oil,one for soap and the other for
oil products.

POINT OF VIEW

1) The Brand’s view


Dove wanted to break the stereotype that women should be ideally always young,
white,blonde and thin. The brand got involved in a number of surveys and research to
understand and tell the world what actually women felt about themselves in their day to
day lives.

2) From the brand’s to the Customer's Point of View


In late 2006, the brand builders in North America announced a contest titled “Real Ads”
by Real Women for creating their own ads for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash, which was
hosted by AOL, where the ads of finalists for the top prize were posted to their official
website.
ROLE OF MEDIA

Dove’s Marketing Director, Phillippe Harousseau described “The Campaign for Real Beauty” - a
campaign which was the first of the exploratory advertising executions. This campaign was
welcomed with a lot of appreciation and was featured in Katie Couric’s Today Show where she
spent 16 minutes with the firming girls and an entire show of Oprah Winfrey with the
advertisement as the centerpiece. Jay Leno ran a parody ad on his talk show and Walmart
developed a version of the ad featuring its employees. Later on, there was another opportunity
for Dove in collaboration with Super Bowl - to which Harousseau did not completely agree with
as the platform did not vibe well the brand’s marketing moves. Another move by the media
agency - “Evolution” was received very well on YouTube and was most downloaded
commercial at the time. It brought up discussions on chatrooms with contributions on topics such
as anorexia and conversations between fathers and daughters.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

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The Public Relations Team at Unilever followed an integrated marketing approach. PR Agency
believed that “The Campaign for Real Beauty” was to establish an emotional connect with
women. The attempt was mainly to create a buzz to feed on the aspect of beauty and its
definitions. The Campaign although appreciated with majority of the people had critics. The
public display of chunky women, half-naked received quite a bit of controversy. Unilever chose
to continue with the same marketing efforts for the campaign and eventually was featured in
People’s magazine’s Cover Story. The media plan also established a global Dove Self-Esteem Fund
which supported uniquely ME! - a partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA. All these attempts
were to build self esteem and confidence in girls.

MARKET POSITIONING

Ogilvy and Mather’s motive behind Brand Positioning was to market the product as a cleansing
cream bar; mainly for women with dry skin instead of it being just a toilet bar. Dove uses its high
moisturizing content to differentiate itself from its competitors. The main theme behind the
positioning aspect of Dove is not to help women become more beautiful but to make them feel
good about themselves. Its marketing strategies behind “The Campaign for Real Women”,
“Dove movement for self esteem” paved way to open up discussions globally on topics such as
self confidence and self esteem.

POSITIONING BY PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES

The product attributes of Dove are that it is cream based, moisturizing, gives rich lather and has
less fragrance with no side effects. It's all about femininity and mildness. It’s simple logo and
tagline seem feminine and so it attracts women all over the world. The name Dove itself talks
about softness, gentleness and sophistication - with the picture of an actual dove in its logo
symbolizing brand meaning.

DOVE IN TODAY’S WORLD

Recently, Unilever announced that all Dove bottles are going to be of 100% recyclable plastic
and the Dove Beauty Bar will be plastic free by the end of 2020. The refillable stainless steel
deodorant sticks are in the works in an effort to reduce its use of virgin plastic by more than
20,500 tons per year. These steps to control the usage of plastic in its production portrays the
brand’s responsibility towards environment.

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One recent campaign - Dove’s #AapkeBaalAapkiMarzi campaign targets stereotypes. It was
developed by Ogilvy India and is an endeavour towards addressing these archaic, pre-defined
stereotypes and encouraging women to stand tall and wear their hair as they like. Although Dove
constantly makes its moves in highlighting its perception of beauty, there was a controversy
which raged upon, was one of the “Real Beauty” campaigns in 2017 - where in an ad, the first
frame shows a dark-skinned woman in what appears to be a bathroom, a bottle of Dove body
wash in the lower right-hand corner of the frame and in subsequent frames, the woman reaches
down and lifts up her shirt (and apparently the rest of her skin/costume) to reveal a smiling white
woman. This received outrage on basis of racism and Dove quickly apologized by saying that it
has missed the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully.

ORGANISING FOR PRODUCT CATEGORY MANAGEMENT AND


BRAND MANAGEMENT

Before 2000
Proctor & Gamble, the main competitor of Hindustan Unilever, had a specific form of marketing
known as the brand management system, where the firm offered several brands under a
particular product category. Each brand operated individually, a separate business from the
others, competing against its siblings and other firms’ products and had a separate manager who
was responsible for handing the same and was the leader as well.
The manager had to design strategy, deliver the profit
targets, and power over many of the day-to-day marketing decisions with respect to advertising
and trade promotions in order to achieve profitability.

After 2000 - BRAND STRUCTURE


After the guidance of Unilever’s five - year strategic initiative ,‘Path to Grow’, had split the
responsibility for a particular brand in between two groups:

● Group 1 - Deal with the brand development - Centralized and global in scope.
This mainly dealt in innovation, development of idea behind the brand and evolving the
same into the future. It mainly focused on medium - to long term market share for brand
health, innovative measures, and value creation in the category.
Apart from these, brand development revolved around television
advertising, other non - traditional media left to be explored, which lead to the
development of the brand plan. Regions where the brand was the strongest were the
locations for brand development.

● Group 2 - Deal with the brand building - Decentralized according to the major
geographic regions. Each and every major market of HUL around the world, was under
the replication of brand building. The managers were responsible for bringing the

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brand to life in their market place. The other significant aspects revolved around the
growth, profit, cash flow, and short-term market share.
Having the freedom to use imagination for breaking
through their particular market’s media clutter, they carried on well in managing public
relations, informal communications, made decisions regarding the spendings to put
behind the media advertising campaigns as received from brand development. Brand
builders reported to a general manager for a collection of brands and in turn reported to a
region manager or country manager .

For the first time, there would be a global brand unit for each masterbrand, with its own
global vision, charged with inspiring cooperation from all geographic markets.

BRAND CONTROL

The brand having its origin in the U.S. had its first product as a beauty bar, launched in
the year 1957, claiming ‘not to dry the skin’ as other ‘old-fashioned’ soap bars,
illustrated with photographs displayed on billboards, television, print, emerging to be
America’s most recognizable brand icons. (Exhibit 1)

The advertisements had minor changes - “cleansing cream” replaced with


“moisturizing cream” , but remained loyal towards its words not to dry the skin, and
continued to refrain from calling itself a soap, for more than 40 years.(Exhibit 2 and 3).
In the 1980s, the ‘beauty bar’ was widely endorsed by physicians and dermatologists
for treating dry skin. ‘Dove’ was dependent on claims of functional superiority backed by
the product’s moisturizing benefit.

In February, 2000, Dove turned out to be a Masterbrand and was asked to lend its name
to Unilever entries in the personal care categories beyond the beauty bar category, such
as deodorants, hair care products, facial cleansers, body lotions, and other hair styling
products. The aim behind advertisements and promotion was to establish a meaning for
Dove and create an extension. However, Dove couldn’t communicate functional
superiority because it reflected different things in different categories. Instead, it should
stand for a point of view, where exploratory market research and expert consultation and
message testing resulted in “The Campaign for Real Beauty.”

BRAND MISSION

In order to anchor to the variety of creative initiatives, Unilever crafted a mission


statement, which unified, “The Campaign for Real Beauty” -

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The mission behind Dove was “to make women feel beautiful everyday by broadening
the narrow definition of beauty and inspire them to take great care of themselves.”

The mission statement’s purpose was depicted by Harousseau, that, the people working in
Dove knew these words by heart, and that it focuses on ‘more women feeling beautiful.’
Their notion is not elitist, but it is Celebratory, Inclusive and Democratic.

CHALLENGES FACED BY DOVE

Unilever’s Masterbrand Dove started facing its challenges with its 2007 campaign,
the“Campaign for Real Beauty” where it received criticisms on risking the brand by featuring
the “Real Beauty” story on online media, positioning it against its heritage image,exposing
hollowness of beauty myths thus establishing it as an ordinary brand. Further the brand faced
controversies on its ad film over the fact that no product was mentioned hence how shall the
brand earn the return on investment in media.
Further challenges were faced by the Public Relation channel strategy, when Dove aimed
at coining media debate and sharing their views on public message control explaining “beauty”
becoming limited and unattainable.
Dove had also come across controversies from various news journals on its “real women
are beautiful” premise, internet postings raising questions about Unilever’s sincerity and motives
and had faced difficulties in expressing its ideology to the market.

STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS DESIGNED BY DOVE

The 2000 Masterbrand of Unilever, Dove when identified that functional superiority no more
describes the brand but had to establish a meaning that defines all brands under the same
category, it fairly developed strategies and solutions to overcome the same.

Strategies

Few of the effective strategies include:


● Exploratory market research , consultation with experts, conversation with women, and
message testing resulting in “The Campaign For Real Beauty”
● In order to understand the perception of ordinary people on “beauty”, Dove had
introduced a campaign where ordinary people were featured in super model contexts and
viewers were asked to vote on whether a woman on billboard was “out-sized” or
“outstanding”
● Their June 2005 promotional strategy included the “ Firming campaign” which promoted
a cream that firms the skin featuring six women. Cheerfully posing in plain white

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underwear. The agenda behind the campaign was to “ change the way society views
beauty”and “provoke discussion and debate about real beauty”
● In late 2006. Dove introduced its “Real Ads by Real Women” contest to invite consumers
to create their own ads for Dove products, to be launched in early 2007.
● Unilever’s Public Relation Channel strategy was another element into market planning
aiming at generating awareness for “The Campaign For Real Beauty” by establishing an
emotional connect with women, strategising partnership of Dove with advocacy
organisation, American Women creating “Dove Real Beauty Award” for organisation’s
annual event and organising globally recognised Dove Self-Esteem Fund for young Girls
Scouts in USA

SOLUTIONS

Few of the effective solutions include:


● In order to determine the goal of personal care and brand development of Dove, Unilever
hired two experts, Nancy Etcoff, a psychiatrist and Suzy Orbach, a psycho-therapist who
explained the focus group and its survey results aligning to the hypothesis.
● Unilever and its Public Relations team , in order to deal with its controversies over
various campaign programs, chose to embrace and fuel the debate over print and
television media ensuring maximum consumer coverage.
● For better performance of brands, Unilever had divided its brand responsibilities into
brand development and brand building in specific markets through its “Path to Grow
initiative”, in 2000.

BRAND MEANING OF DOVE TODAY

From studies and blog searches , today dove is perceived as a brand that believes in no racism as
it had featured black models to its ads saying they are beautiful, as learned from a Nigerian
Model featured in Dove ad. It is perceived as a symbol of positivity-, relatability as it features
ordinary women that unattainable images and a deep trust in the brand realising one’s body
image to be beautiful than to be ashamed of. Reviews say, it is a brand that brings out one’s self
confidence and esteem identifying it’s inner beauty.
The brand meaning of Dove symbolises beauty as an emblem of peace, love , gentleness,
inspiring more women to feel beautiful. Till date, Dove stays at its promise as learned from its
reviews, making women believe in natural beauty portraying gentle,smooth skin that shall not be

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covered but exposed. Dove lifts up to its brand meaning by offering a sense of joy to every
woman aging from 18-65 where they believe themselves to be beautiful realising age, shape, and
size to be a part of physical appearance and not to be dominated in the definition of “beauty”.
Young women using dove believe, it’s the attitude and spirit that contributes and live a
comfortable lifestyle.

CONCLUSION

Dove was identified as one of the 10 brands with the greatest percentage gain in brand health and
business value.
The campaign for Real Beauty had touched a nerve with the public.
Hundreds of blogs were written and forum chats discussed about its campaign. The message had
a great impact and people started to view beauty differently and wanted to understand what
women felt about their looks and appearance.

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