Groundswell: Beauty or Bust?

In Chapter 10 of Groundswell by Li and Bernoff, Dove is used as an example of “letting go of control to win over the groundswell” (200). Back in 2004, Unilever started Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. They decided to hand off the responsibilities to an outside source to come up with the idea and advertising. After a failed attempt at getting participants of The Apprentice involved, they moved to Web videos. These videos drove many people to visit their website, as they were targeted to the consumers that wanted to hear from Dove.

However, isn’t this just called outsourcing? Isn’t this what most companies do these days? They hire outside help, whether it’s for running social media, measuring statistics or handling a website. I don’t think this is letting go of control so much as it is handing off your project to another company.

Anyways, more recently Dove came out with another wave of the Campaign for Real Beauty with the “Real Beauty Sketches” YouTube video. This was a video that brought in a FBI-trained artist that drew a portrait of a woman only by what she described to him. Then, a stranger described the same woman and he drew another portrait. The two portraits were then hung side by side. Each woman went around to her portraits and noticed the significant changes.

Usually, the portrait drawn by her explanation was much darker, meaner-looking, and even grumpier. The portraits drawn by the stranger’s description looked more happy and inviting. The women were shocked at how critical they were of themselves. The last words of the video are “You are more beautiful than you think.”

I have many mixed feelings about this video and this campaign. On one hand, I think that it is wonderful Dove is making us women think twice about how we look. I am definitely a culprit of being too critical of what I look like.

On the other hand, this campaign is for Dove. Dove sells beauty products. If they say, “You are more beautiful than you think,” then that means consumers DON’T need beauty products to make them feel beautiful. Aren’t they trying to sell their beauty products?

So, when it comes to Dove’s campaign, I am too confused to act upon it. Yeah, I take a second to think about my body image whenever I see one of their ads, but then I continue on with my day. I am going to continue to buy the regular Dove body bar because that’s the brand I always buy.

What are your thoughts on this campaign? Has it made you change the way you think about yourself or influenced you to buy more Dove products? Or have you completely ignored it?