Dove worked with influencers to create a 10-episode series to encourage Chinese women to post unfiltered photos and videos on social media and reinforce its "Real Beauty" brand message. To supplement the program, Dove invited 100 women to participate in an unfiltered portrait photoshoot. These photos would ultimately become part of Dove's "My Beauty, My Say" exhibit in Beijing.
Objective
China is a distinct and challenging market. For a global brand like Dove, purpose-driven campaigns require specific local strategies to be relevant to its audience and stand out from its competitors.
In recent years, Chinese domestic brands were capturing share of market and were integrating a more diverse approach to beauty into their advertising and positioning. As part of the brand's efforts to focus on the culture of beauty, Dove sought to actively drive conversation on the impacts of digital behaviors in 2022.
Dove set out to change this with several objectives:
Context
Dove has stood by its core brand message of Real Beauty for years without fail. So, when new and more sophisticated filter tech and settings started popping up in China, Dove saw the effects it had on its target audience and knew it had to act.
Through its research, Dove found that around 40 million Chinese citizens per month used specialist photography and filter apps. These come with a wide variety of filter features, targeting specific parts of the face and body. Therefore, it's not just about "adding a filter" but a culture in which women adjust specific parts of their face and body to fit expectations.
Target Audience
Dove's main audience was women aged 20 to 40, mainly living in China's more developed first- and second-tier cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou. Like their peers living in New York, Los Angeles, or London, these women are constantly connected to their phones.
While many of the apps they use are similar, there is a significant difference: In China, when women turn on the camera on their everyday apps, beauty filters are on by default. This created a "filter cycle" that was difficult to opt-out of.
Creative and Media Strategy
Dove's idea was to tackle this directly, by focusing on the "un-filtered" stories of Chinese women. But in China, it's deemed highly disrespectful to ask if a photo has been filtered or adjusted. Despite being ubiquitous, the use of filters is almost a taboo topic.
So, it's important that this media integration put Dove's message into the heart of personal conversations of high-profile women. This created the space for other women to add their stories.
So, Dove launched via a popular mass media property and used this high-reach moment to connect across channels and amplify the conversation.
The "filter culture" in China is so ingrained in everyday life, that Dove's strategy was to start the conversation in a high profile, mass media property called 100 Girls Journey Home. This program is one of China's most popular for women and is centered on conversations between women and a host. The conversations explore modern views and attitudes about life. Across 10 60-minute episodes, the conversation format was the ideal way to start the discussion with some of China's most influential and visible women.
From this high-reach moment, Dove then connected across channels and platforms to amplify and fuel the conversation. The key channels were:
Each episode of "100 Girls Journey Home" brought deeply personal stories into the public eye, which immediately resonated with Dove's audience. During the conversations, the ten women shared real photos and stories from their past to the present. These unfiltered exchanges inspired others to share theirs too.
After each episode, the celebrities from the show would re-share their story on Weibo. Dove then worked with female influencers who matched the theme of each episode to add further stories, inspiring discussion. This led women to share their stories too, generating further visibility for Dove.
Dove then highlighted certain stories with a moving short video galvanizing women to not be ashamed of sharing unfiltered photos. After its viral release, Dove invited 100 women who posted online to participate in an unfiltered portrait photo session. These became the "My Beauty, My Say" photo exhibition in Beijing — with unfiltered portraits displayed next to the women's stories. Dove even extended the campaign to ecommerce by using brand ambassadors in their JD ecommerce livestreams, where their stories drove viewership and positively impacted sales.
With this campaign, Dove extended its long-running brand purpose, making it more relevant for today's Chinese women. Campaign results included:
By integrating the campaign into the ecommerce platform strategy, over one million people watched Dove's JD livestream leading to a sales increase of 186 percent, compared to non-campaign periods.
This campaign also tangibly affected the beauty conversation in China. Almost 850,000 people discussed the topic online and over 39,000 women posted their unfiltered photos and stories. The My Beauty, My Say photo exhibition in Beijing remains China's largest un-touched exhibition of women in China.
