Everything Else

“Campaign for Real Beauty” was perhaps the first advertising campaign that had placed emphasis on the societal marketing concept rather than highlighting the benefits of using the Dove line of products.  The societal marketing is a liberating marketing approach, which implies that a company should always focus its marketing strategies, not only on company’s interest, but also on society’s welfare. 

“Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does,” is the slogan of the long applauded Evolution’s sequel. Strong from start to end, both on the visual and the audio levels, the Onslaught ad is featuring a charming innocent young girl facing the camera, while a series fast pieced advertisements seems to “flood” girl’s field of view. (It implies the effects of prolonged mediated exposure to “airbrushed” messages) Key words such as transform, diet, younger, smaller, lighter, thinner, firmer so on and so forth, give weight and complete the collage of stereotypical images of glamorous women. The ad is believable since it has an aura of authenticity and is exploiting 3 important appeals in advertising, the rational, the emotional, and not lastly the moral one. As for the execution style, the concepts juxtapose elements from real life (the little girl) with elements from a mediated glamorous lifestyle (the models). The ad is unveiling, the counterfeit appeals that the advertising industry relies upon promoting end perpetuating the beauty myth. 

However, according to Greenpeace, “Unilever, the company behind products like Dove soap, is driving forest destruction and speeding up climate change by buying palm oil from companies which are destroying Indonesia’s rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. By their own admission, Unilever is the biggest single user of palm oil in the world.”