Dove created a film and worked with 13 Indian women to share stories about body shaming to drive awareness of the negative impact of beauty tests.
Objective:
The Indian beauty market has seen a steep rise in domestic direct-to-consumer (D2C) personal care brands that serve needs specific to Indian audiences. To sustain growth in a cluttered and price-sensitive market, it was imperative for Dove to establish differentiation and loyalty by being more culturally meaningful to Indian women.
Driven by its global purpose of challenging beauty stereotypes and finding a local connection that resonates, Dove conducted a study that discovered that 80 percent of schoolgirls in India face a beauty test. Based on this startling insight, the brand launched #StopTheBeautyTest, a campaign aimed at sensitizing society on how early body shaming starts in India and its effect on young girls.
As the brand took up the challenge of influencing society's regressive mindset, it realized that it would be an uphill task that would require creating deep meaningful engagements and awareness.
Target Audience:
Two key stakeholders were identified as the brands target audience to combat the impact of beauty test on teenage girls:
#StopTheBeautyTest was an appeal from women, targeted to every individual, community, and society at large that continued condoning beauty stereotypes.
Creative Strategy:
Social media fosters self-expression by providing a very conducive environment for sharing personal stories in a very personal way. Social platforms have become one of the lead mediums for the discovery of information, making it the perfect channel for Dove to pose its burning question to millions of Indian women and educated others.
The question was further made more engaging by building it into a filter that coaxed users to share their first body shaming experience, unearthing hard-hitting true stories to carry the brand's message: #StopTheBeautyTest.
Context:
Dove's campaign embodied the brand's global purpose of championing "real beauty," to India.
This year, the brand focused on when beauty tests truly start — adolescence. In these formative years, society imprints an idea of "perfect beauty" on girls. This definition becomes the unrealistic yardstick by which girls measure their beauty, leading most girls to the realization that they are not beautiful by society's standards.
Dove's campaign wanted to drive awareness of this insight in a powerful way to engage, educate, and inspire society to make a conscious choice to stop the beauty tests.
Overall Campaign Execution:
To emphasize the prevalence of this social evil, Dove deployed a two-pronged approach.
Provoke
Dove wanted to inspire the target audience to share their personal stories. To this end, the brand:
Amplify
Dove wanted to scale up its movement to make it a part of culture and create a conversation to drive a greater impact. To this end the brand:
Mobile Execution:
Today's changemakers like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai have altered the world's perspectives using social media, and also had the right personalities and icons on-board to champion Dove's cause.
Digital communities like Momspresso, She The People, and Humans of Mumbai provided the right audience for extrapolating the brand's special filter and brand message.
Even the TV coverage was seamlessly linked with Dove's sharing movement. By running a QR code throughout, viewers who discovered the filter could use it to share their heart-touching first experience of body shaming.
Dove was always a brand that held high brand perception scores. However recent efforts by heritage brands and digital first brands were posing a challenge prompting the need to differentiate.
The campaign results included:
