Dove Case

Case Synopsis:

Dove is the world’s number-one health and beauty brand under Unilever that has the wide range of personal “cleansing” products. In February 2000, Unilever officially executed a five-year “Path to Growth” strategic initiative. Only 400 brands out of more than 1600 brands survived, and a small number of brands will be selected as “Masterbrands”. Dove as one of the “Masterbands”, lunched “The Campaign for Real Beauty” to build brand awareness and differentiate with competitor’s product. With the development of campaign, “Real Beauty” became a controversial topic on media that brought more people into discussion, and concerns within the brand team began to grow.

Assessment:

Product:

Dove was well known by successfully releasing the “beauty bar” in the post-Word War II era because of the endorsed moisturizing benefit. The company stayed with the simple “not to dry skin” propositions, kept researching and developing new products to achieve brand extension in brand development. Soon, variety of new products enriched the categories in Dove, such as deodorants, hair care products, facial cleansers etc.

Marketing

The entire plan had four stages: Tick-box campaign, firming campaign, self-esteem campaign and a digital film “Evolution”. Dove won the good perceived quality award because customers had great recognition based on the perception of overall quality and superiority of Dove’s product through the first stage. Dove kept working on brand awareness through continuously evolving the campaign, progressing through each stage as previously stated. During the firming and self-esteem stage, Dove came up with the “Real Beauty” and “Self-esteem” advertisements that have a strong emotional connection with the audience and successfully delivered the self-acceptance