We all remember Dove's Evolution campaign about the realities of makeup and Photoshop from 2006. The video fast-forwards us through a pretty, but ordinary looking woman going through all the hair, makeup, and retouching that goes into the final, "perfected" looks we see in magazines. The video is just over a minute, but is amazingly eye-opening into the world of what a highly trained team of professional makeup artists and retouchers can do to transform how a woman looks.
This year, Dove came out with their newest campaign, Dove Real Beauty Sketches (by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil), that has the same kind of raw emotional quality to how women see and feel about themselves. This time, a professional forensic sketch artist was hired to draw two portraits of seven different participants: one where the participant describes themselves, and one where a complete stranger describes them. It's a very interesting experiment to explore the way we see ourselves, and the results were eye-opening.
The sketches above show that, without a doubt, the women interviewed described themselves to be much more unattractive than the stranger described them. About themselves, women would say they had a "pointy, protruding chin", a "big forehead", and several other things women tend to get down on themselves about. Strangers described each other as being "thin", with "pretty eyes", and other compliments that were definitely a sharp contrast to the way each woman described herself.
Empowering women to be their very best is very close to our hearts at DFM, which is exactly why we think this campaign is great. We're so impressed that Dove has made itself so much more than just a company that makes soap - Dove is selling a philosophy: that women should see their natural beauty and love themselves despite all their "imperfections", which are beautiful. Transforming a brand of pretty standard, ordinary soap products into a sort of revolution of women's empowerment is exactly what every marketing professional should aspire to, we think. Dove is making a positive impact on the world... one bar of soap at a time.
Dove Evolution photo from Strategy Online, Dove Beauty Sketches (and video) from AdWeek
