Introduction
Advertisers are tasked with generating solid, elevated leads for their companies. These include either short-range or long objectives. But just how will they go about achieving these objectives? Obviously, you can do this by conducting numerous campaigns. This also implies that they must assess whether their efforts are worthwhile. This is when campaign numbers come into play. A brand campaign entails an attempt to encourage your company’s story and product outside a larger target with an objective of building the impression in the minds of customers. Brand campaign is a strategy for taking charge of a brand’s operations and market face while also distinguishing oneself from competition. It has an impact on a marketer’s judgment about where to deploy the advertising budget and what approach he should use in the long term. It’s also helpful for increasing a company’s efficiency and quality (Petrella, 2020). Advertisers will understand where to engage and why, rather than placing all their eggs in one basket.
The data linked to the outcomes of marketing strategies is known as campaign analytics. Marketers may send out promotional emails or use social media to reach out to customers. It is vital to study and test many indicators in order to determine the outcome of these marketing efforts. One might believe that developing a marketing strategy is comparable to moving a hill. However, this isn’t the case. A well-planned marketing strategy may considerably increase your income, even if it appears complex and time-consuming. Advertising strategies are often created to target and engage a narrow group of people. Before you can set one, you must first figure out the campaign’s aim. The more specific your objectives are, the more likely you are to achieve them. Marketers create a variety of campaigns, the three most common of which are social media, email, and paid advertising.
Understanding the difference between a brand and a campaign can shed light on this topic of brand managing and campaign analysis. All of the elements that make up a company’s or product’s identification make up the company’s brand. Consumers recognize successful brands and rely on a consistent message across all marketing channels. A campaign, on the contrary, is a marketing effort aimed at promoting a good or service. These promotions are frequently timed and short-term, and they cater to a more specific audience. As a result, when the two are combined, you get a brand campaign. Several factors come into play when designing and planning for a brand campaign, including budget limits, target audience, and marketing timelines. Basically, a market sentiment is an opportunity for a business to enhance or reinvent its image in the eyes of customers. Owing to these actions, any value proposition may become not only a global brand, as well as the grab product whenever a customer is ready to buy (Hoyer, Kroschke, Schmitt, Kraume, & Shankar, 2020). One should be able to design a successful marketing strategy that would drive the company’s entire advertising strategy for years if they keep these guidelines in mind.
To take advantage of the rising prospects on the internet and in the overall advertising sector, it is considered that both a physical and digital marketing plan is required. However, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. A brand campaign model is a structure for a company’s marketing initiatives that offers a systematic process to follow in order to ensure that they reap the benefits of the equipment and digital advertising networks that are appropriate for their brands, as well as keeping their efforts on the right path during the deployment and conception phase (MacInnis & Folkes, 2017). This paper focuses on a brand company called Dove. In the United States, Unilever, an international consumer goods company, manages the Dove beauty care brand. Dove products are created in a number of countries globally. The items are available for ladies, males, and newborns and are distributed in over 100 countries worldwide. This paper focuses on Dove’s brand campaign; specifically, courage is a beautiful campaign with the subject matter for Dove focusing on Authentic Marketing.
Dove Company
Dove was named a maestro trademark for Unilever, a significant maker of packed consumer products in the culinary, household, and hygiene products sectors, in 2000. Vaseline, Suave, Knorr, and Ben & Jerry’s are just a few of the business’s successful brands (Deighton, 2008). “Adding vibrancy to life” was the inspiration for the brand image. Unilever created a comprehensive strategy called “Path to Growth” in 2000, in which they reduced their 1,600 trademarks to only 400. The purpose of downsizing the portfolio of brands was to simplify the company spectrum in order to match the “imperativeness” notion. Following WWII, treatment of scars and injuries became a need. When Dove, a bar created as a military technology, hit the market, the Ogilvy & Mather marketing firm — Dove’s initial advertisers – had no choice but to underline the bar’s “features.” Their advertisement emphasized the “hydrating cream” effect of the bar. This period is known as Dove’s “functional era.”
Dove has been a strong brand from its inception, and its name can now be found on a variety of health and beauty items in addition to cleaning soap. Dove is a men’s and women’s fragrance that is offered in over 100 countries worldwide. Antiperspirants, deodorants, shower gels, soap bars, lotions, hairdos, and skin products are among the items available. Neutrogena and Lux are their key competitors in terms of quality, style, and pricing. Dove employs a segmented strategy, with each sector receiving its own marketing plan. For instance, archetypal “ideal” ladies have been featured in Dove Men care advertising to indicate that males who are using Dove Men care products are more appealing. Dove’s initial product range, particularly the “Operation for Real Beauty,” on the other hand, has a way of promoting varied body forms in women.
Dove’s practical benefits period began in 1950. The group’s strategic goal was to develop a successful brand positioning strategic plan by emphasizing product features and advantages. Dove first claimed that its products would just not dry out the skin since it contained washing cream, which was subsequently renamed moisturizing cream. Secondly, it argued that their item was not just a bar of soap, but rather something a little more refined, referring to it as a beauty bar and using dermatologists’ testimony to back up its claims. This served as a point of distinction. Dove’s viewpoint period began in 2007. The firm was the ranked top one “cleaning” trademark in the beauty and wellness industry at the time. Dove’s status in 2007 was established during the changeover era of 2002.
Dove was picked as Unilever’s Master brand after demonstrating its capacity as a strong, long-lasting brand. However, in order to further expand the subsidies, Unilever sought to give the brand meaning that could be applied to personal grooming areas as well, bolstering its core competencies. The conception of the My Real Beauty campaign, which assisted in separating Dove from its rivals, was based on thorough market research, expert advice, and messaging testing. As stated in the new mission, the movement aimed to draw people’s attention to true beauty instead of selling phoney images. This approach would no longer engage Dove solely on the basis of its operational advantages but also on its values and perspective.
Dove’s product line has grown throughout time to include shampoos, conditioners, face skincare, and self-tanning cosmetics, as well as a distinct male makeup and cosmetic brand. The Dove Company was estimated at $5.1 billion in value in the United States in 2021. Its advertisements have received critical accolades on both a global and regional scale over the previous 20 years. Dove offers much more aesthetics; it inspires its clients and followers to ponder on ego and self-acceptance. Dove is always inventive and brave. Considering that a number of beauty-related advertisements focus on mending or concealing personal flaws, this idea may appear to be a clear contrast. Dove, on the other hand, makes it work. Some other simple reason has helped it maintain its position as one of the best-performing companies: digitalization is at the heart of just about everything Dove undertakes.
Prior to the 2000s, Unilever handled its brands in a largely decentralized fashion, with no unifying strategy since brands had various identities. Every Corporate Strategy Unit functioned independently, with no objective of establishing a solid brand identity. Unilever had a brand management program whereby each trademark was overseen by its marketing director; as a consequence, each brand worked independently and battled within its divisions. Unilever intended to lead each subsidy internationally in an autonomous manner after 2000 for the corresponding structure. This tactic attempted to force them to compete against more well-known brands.
The management plan for brands was shared between two groups as part of the “Path to Growth” strategy. One centred on brand development, with worldwide scope and responsibility for the brand’s growth, encompassing protracted market dominance, brand health, creativeness, brand strategy, media, and value creation. The other was brand development, which was concerned with relatively brief sales volume, profitability, money flow, media relations, unstructured communication channels, and advertising spending. Prior to the 2000s, Dove’s brand meaning was basic and unambiguous. Genuine and honest advertisements, backed by dermatology studies, emphasized Dove’s higher beneficial properties above standard soap brands.
Following the year 2000, the corporation attempted to engage more by doing research in order to provide sound marketing that would develop the company’s reputation and feeling of honesty and correctness in what they are doing. Consumers have become more aware and cognizant of what they’re exposed to as time has passed, assessing and evaluating options to make good selection possible. As a result, rather than a simple television commercial, Dove had to go the additional mile and build a movement. As a result, Dove was a trailblazer in applying ethical, dynamic, and immersive marketing in 2007. It saw the need to boost its public relations techniques by creating the International Dove Self Esteem Initiative, forming a collaboration with the American Woman group, and holding seminars as a result of its awareness of its consumers’ needs and purpose-driven branding. As seen from these, the marketing strategies employed by Dove have almost all been successful in attaining their goals. The brand has ventured on several brand campaigns and initiatives to promote its products and engage its consumers at a personal level. They have mastered the art of involving their target market with their products, thus making their customers feel more connected to the brand than the product. By doing so, they enhance their customer loyalty which makes their brand most preferred to a broader market even when they debut new products.
Brand Campaigns and Impacts
Reflecting closely at Dove’s marketing concepts, it’s clear that women have been at the centre of the company’s efforts. Although all of the advertising featured ladies of all ethnicities and body kinds, one element is absent. In none of these adverts are there any guys. There’s nothing in Dove’s most renowned commodity, the beauty bar that suggests it’s solely for women. It’s just a cleansing bar that won’t irritate your skin. Dove noticed this and ventured into expanding into men’s markets as a market and product extension strategy. Body confidence issues have long been seen as a female problem, but males can suffer from them. You may see guys with sculpted physiques and neatly groomed beards as you scroll through magazine pages, all of which make up the “ideal man.” Men are under a lot of pressure to look “manly” and be physically active. However, few organizations mention the reality that males, like women, are subjected to similar ideal body demands. Generally speaking, many men are dissatisfied with some aspect of their physical looks, muscular size, or weight. According to research conducted in Arizona, one out of every four men suffers from an eating issue. This is what Dove has closely evaluated and tried to solve so as to remain relevant in the market.
Dove started to evolve as a real innovator in its industry as recently as 2004 when it pioneered the notion of Real Beauty (Griffin, 2021). Although it was revolutionary at the time, the idea of displaying women in more natural settings – without skilled makeup and lighting – has become a commonly used hashtag. The project launched a number of billboards in the U. S. that featured photographs of everyday women rather than glamour models, together with a witty query urging people to comment. Passers-by may vote on whether they were “Fat or Fab,” or “Creased or Magnificent,” while the results being shown on boards. Dove used bold, stand-out advertising that immediately drew the public’s attention and its intended audience at a moment when competitors had yet to recognize the importance of digital interaction. During the first decade of the Real Beauty campaign, Dove reported a rise in sales by over $2 billion. Dove beauty bars became one of the most popular products in the US and best-selling product by Unilever.
In 2006, the Dove Self Esteem Initiative was founded, an interactive web platform designed to assist youngsters in enhancing themselves through articles online, video conferences, and seminars on ego, body acceptance, and harassment. This was another industry first and a brilliant activation method, demonstrating Dove’s capability to transition to media content in reaction to this age group’s expanding consumption trend. Dove flipped the concept of the self-portrait on its side with the award-winning “Real Beauty Sketches” in 2006. In this viral film, each lady was allowed to express herself, accompanied by a stranger’s depiction of her. A skilled artist saw both and then drew two portraits based on two distinct accounts. The results were intriguing, with an objective of reflecting how individuals perceive themselves in comparison to how others perceive them. The film went on to become one of the most popular series of the decade, and on Mother’s Day 2013, and even more moving series included daughters discussing their moms. These creative marketing approaches undertaken by Dove have enabled them to stand tall in the industry, thus pushing their brand to the broader global limits. The brand campaigns have made Dove a trusted product by portraying the brand as consumer considerate rather than just focusing on profit gaps like how other brands develop and market their products.
The Dove Courage is Beautiful campaign
Health professionals on the front lines throughout the world facing the new coronavirus, among other illnesses, deserve all of the recognition and inspiration they can get from all of the world’s populations. COVID-19 has already affected over 400 million individuals over the globe. In contrast, medical personnel have placed their own lives on wait, putting their own lives in jeopardy in order to rescue and preserve the lives of everyone else. The Dove Courage is Beautiful initiative honours medical personnel’s bravery while encouraging everybody to stay at home, observe the limits of regulations and authorities throughout the world, and aid people in need through contributions and assistance during this critical time (Zainab Damji, n.d.).
Dove is issuing a massive statement with its current commercial campaign, and it all comes together in a flash. While you may have observed, many beauty and non-beauty companies have had to fast shift gears as most of the United States (and the rest of the globe) confronts the coronavirus epidemic. Many firms are doing everything they can to help, from realigning output in their facilities towards much-needed sanitiser to making tremendous gifts. That means you’ve undoubtedly seen a number of commercials that directly address the epidemic and its economic consequences. With its new Courage Is Beautiful ad, Dove is going straight for the hearts with a statement of appreciation for health care personnel who labour hard on front ranks to help manage COVID-19 patients. The very first ad is lovely in its minimalism, displaying the photos of nurses and physicians whose faces are scarred by the protective clothing they must wear on a daily basis. The ads, which first aired in Canada, are now being broadcast in the United States.
The impacts and results of this campaign have been felt across America as Dove continues to push on their venture in appreciating health care workers and their customers in the US an entire globe. Dove donated over $4 million contributions to charities towards protective gear for health professionals on the frontlines in the US and to support people affected by the Covid-19 epidemic getting them supplies. Unilever, Dove’s parent organization, has also provided approximately 200,000 masks to regional facilities in New Jersey, as well as $108 million in soap, sanitizer, bleach, and food to aid in the fight against COVID-19. While the medical team saves lives, they support and encourage the rest of the globe to do the same. As medics work to save lives, Dove continues to warn the entire world to exercise social distance and quarantine to avoid an escalation in the staggering number of Covid-19 incidents reported across the globe.
The campaign saw the onset of several other organizations in the industry, such as Colgate and Dettol, also chip in with other campaigns of a similar manner to show support to the entire world during the pandemic crisis. “This interaction we have had on broadcast is not important anymore,” Manfredi uttered in one of the virtual meetings of Dove. “I am a true believer in True Beauty and personality. But no matter how timely these discussions about beauty may have sounded a few months earlier, they now appear shallow” (Blogtaboola, 2020). Dove isn’t giving up on the matter of personality in the face of appearance. Originally designed for academia as well as other public institutions, self-esteem workshops are increasingly being modified for use at household. Dove is also running a program designed by Edelman as part of an international agreement with the state of UK to fund more than $60 million on basic hygiene promotion.
Courage is Beautiful Campaign Impacts
The campaign has resulted in a deep emotional bond between the company and its customers. Every variation of Dove’s message reflects an intimate awareness of customer insights. 2015 speak beautiful campaign, in which they worked with Twitter to assist counterbalance disparaging comments regarding body image and reply to these comments in real-time, is an example of their innovative, intelligent, and ground-breaking digital marketing initiatives. Twitter and Dove worked on a video advert on body image that aired in the Oscars kick-off broadcast in 2015 to commence the effort. In only one year, females had used the #speakbeautiful hashtag over 170000 times, culminating in over 900 million active social media engagements.
This campaign is not the first in recent years to strengthen the bond between their consumers and the Dove Company. They teamed with prized photography artists to shoot’ real women’ images for their 2017 ‘Real Women’ photo campaign, showing their tenacity, resilience, and skill. These photographs were labelled as stunning and posted to the media centre in collaboration with Shutterstock so that they would appear in future searches. Dove then urged other photographers and companies to support the movement, which was a creative way of enlisting favourable support for its message on real beauty. Dove’s 2018 ‘No distortion’ ad was inspired by the increasing popularity of social media and the rising emphasis on bodily perfectionism, especially among teenage girls. Dove launched the “No Digital Distortion” logo, a sign to show that images were not enhanced in any manner, as a protest against the alteration of women’s looks for online publishing purposes. This was a smart move because the sign appeared on almost everything Dove manufactures, including digital and print commercials, customized material, and social media content. It’s a constant reminder of Dove’s message across conventional and digital platforms, reinforcing their dedication to real beauty on a daily basis. As part of its self-consciousness Project, Dove went even further to exhibit its approach in this area, signing a two-year worldwide relationship with the Cartoon Network show “Steven Universe” to encourage juveniles on body acceptance and self-confidence. This has been the main impact of the Courage is Beautiful Campaign apart from appreciating and helping millions of medical professionals in America and the entire globe through the Covid-19 pandemic heat.
Courage is Beautiful Campaign Issues
As discussed earlier, Dove has had several moments of success in its brand campaigns and marketing strategies over the years. However, this has not always been the case. Like everyone else and every organization out there, they have also had bad and poor decisions in their marketing planning. For instance, Dove had to apologize in 2011 for a commercial for their Visible Care body cleanser that appeared to feature a black lady in the “prior” shot and a white female with “particularly gorgeous skin” in the “after” image. Dove was also chastised in 2012 for promoting their Summer Glow Moisturizer as also being suitable for “average to the black complexion.” A few years ago, in 2015, Dove was chastised for an outside engagement of its Choose Beautiful campaign that didn’t go through as they had hoped. Women got the option of selecting a gateway based on how women felt about themselves (Chumsky, 2015). The use of such a strategy to increase consciousness was widely criticized as massive, unjust, and deceptive by reviewers. Using this strategy to ostensibly promote personal identity received a lot of negative attention.
The recent Courage is Beautiful Campaign has also not been left out on the topic of campaigns with issues. Although this campaign was monumental in shedding light on health care workers during Covid-19, they failed to include other essential workers in their campaign, only highlighting hospital workers. I feel they could’ve included EMTs, Firefighters, Police and other essential workers. As much as healthcare workers deserved recognition and appreciation during that time, other essential workers were also in the frontline during the same period trying to feed or secure the nation from other disasters. They should have included other essential workers too in the campaign. They also aired one ad in the US, and a completely different one in Canada, that featured only one person of colour. As seen before, this is also an issue of racial balance that should be avoided in future campaigns.
Conclusion
Overall, advertisers are well aware of the significance of raising brand recognition. Increasing brand recognition is a top priority for B2C and B2B managers for ages now, per the Content Marketing Organization in the United States (Hughes, Swaminathan, & Brooks, 2019). Even yet, you should just not engage in a brand marketing strategy simply because everybody is. To achieve a company’s goals, one need grasp the significance of brand recognition and how to leverage it. The importance of a brand campaign cannot be overstated, as it entails the primary stages in the advertising charts and establishes the basis for gaining clients and consumers. Brand campaign success should match to audience capability to remember the brand. For a myriad of purposes, cultivating brand awareness is vital. For a start, brand initiatives help to maintain the company’s name in front of its core demographic. If individuals are familiar with your company, they can learn more about it. Individuals will opt for a brand they know more than their rival if they have to select. One may leverage brand recognition to accomplish a list of company goals. To cast a wide net, promotions strategies to enhance brand recognition are used. They inform a wide number of people about what you’re doing and what you have to sell, cultivating those who are most excited concerning ones products or services.
In the case of Dove, it is much evidence that the company has mastered the art of using brand campaigns to its utmost advantage. With more than four brand campaigns implemented within the last decade, each of them leaving a mark in the industry, Dove has been using these campaigns as a robust and effective marketing strategy. They have created a bond with their clients and customers, thus enhancing customer loyalty over the years. These acts have seen Dove develop from a small firm to become one of the world’s most extensive household and personal care products in the years. However, several concerns can be noted from their brand campaigns. The issue of focusing on one ethnicity on the brand campaign face in a region with over ten different ethnicities has been a concern and thus creating misunderstandings from their rivals. They should include other races in their campaigns so as to make their brand more appealing.
References
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