Passion or Performance?: Examining Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”

Abstract

It is no secret that marketing and advertising have historically been weaponized as tools to define and propagate social norms. This phenomenon has proven particularly true in the beauty industry, a field notorious for manufacturing sexist and harmful messages that reinforce popular perceptions of “attractiveness” and contribute to the continued oppression and sexualization of American women (McCleary, 2014). The scope of the influence of beauty industry marketing was plainly revealed by a global report called “The Real Truth About Beauty” that was commissioned by Dove in 2004 (Millard, 2009). This study, a telephone survey consisting of 3,200 respondents, exposed that only two percent of women around the world identified with the word “beautiful” to describe their looks (Etcoff et al., 2004). It also uncovered that seventy-five percent of women between the ages of eighteen and sixty four “would like to see considerably more diversity in the images of beauty” presented to them, and that seventy-six percent of the same demographic hoped to see the media portray beauty as more than just physical (McCleary, 2014, p. 2).

In response to these findings, Dove launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty”, a series of advertisements free of retouching that depicted women whose appearances deviated from the traditional beauty norm (McCleary, 2014). Each of these women had “flaws” deemed unattractive by general social standards, including grey hair, stretch marks, flat chests, and freckles, amongst other characteristics (McCleary, 2014). The mission of the campaign was threefold: to fund the continuation of the Real Beauty campaign through product sales, to provide self-esteem resources and events for women through the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, and to promote untouched images of people who are not professional models (Millard, 2009). Arguing that Dove’s strategies were unsuccessful is futile - since the campaign’s initial implementation, it has generated significant profit, garnered a number of celebrity endorsements, and been the subject of a great deal of media acclaim and accolades from professional associations and gender scholars (Johnston and Taylor, 2008). However, in this paper I will assert that as an object of feminist consumerism, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty actually serves to harm women by appropriating feminist discourse with a profit imperative and systematically legitimizing existing beauty ideals. My goal is to justify this position by examining The Dove Movement for Self-Esteem and Dove’s 2007 short film Onslaught. The analysis provided in this work will also be supplemented by studies revealing audience perception and interpretation of Dove’s campaign in addition to comparison of its effectiveness with that of grassroots models of social change. Finally, my stance will be informed by the greater concepts of commodity feminism, postfeminism, and femvertising.