Dove Campaign-RESEARCH

Dove: a clean campaign?

Unilever's toiletry brand Dove has become a household name thanks to its 'Campaign for Real Beauty' which uses real women in ads to challenge the notions of stick-thin, air-brushed beauty pushed by the media. But is Dove's campaign as clean as it seems?

The campaign kicked off in 2003 with ads featuring six ordinary women in their underwear, and it obviously struck a chord - sales of Dove's skin-firming lotion increased by 700%.

And last year consumers were asked to make judgment about a series of photos of women who didn't fit the glossy mag mould. Was a plus-sized woman oversized or outstanding? Was a woman with small breast half empty or half full?

Now Dove has launched its next campaign aimed squarely at young girls and teenagers. According to Dove's research six out of 10 teenage girls think they would be happier if they were thinner and while 30% of eight- to 12-year-old girls want to be slimmer.

Rather than promoting a product, Dove's new campaign promotes a fund set up to donate money to charities that promote wellbeing and raise self-esteem. It has also produced a schools teaching resource which aims to help pupils understand and cope with how they feel about their physical appearance.

All well and good. But is it? Are the methods Dove is using to sell soap, lotions and potions less insidious than those used by brands that perpetuate the myth of female physical perfection and persist in peddling the sexualisation of women?

Dove can surely be commended for making an effort to change perceptions of beauty in advertising, however we shouldn't get carried away.

Take the first campaign, the six real women in white underwear. The unusualness use of women in the ad glosses over the fact that the product it is pushing is a skin firming lotion. If the women shown were that happy with your bodies they wouldn't need a skin-firming lotion. L'Oreal was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for making "misleading" claims about a similar kind of cellulite cream.

The new campaign, says Dove, aims to encourage adult women to help girls and teenagers feel better about themselves. But if girls as young as eight are concerned about their appearance, they are also ideal targets as the new generation of beauty product consumers, ripe to get hooked on a particular brand. Dove, say.

And what of the BodyTalk educational packs produced by Dove to tie-in with its new campaign? Is it admirable that a brand has produced glossy packs with free DVDs for schools? Or is it just one more example of the invidious way brands are infiltrating our classrooms and marketing to children by stealth, playing on under-funded and time-poor teachers.

Meanwhile let us not forget that Dove is made by Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer good companies, which also produces Lynx, Lux, Sunsilk and Timotei.

The entire advertising proposition for Lynx, one of the most successful grooming products for young men, relies on the sexualisation of women. What Dove gives with one hand, Unilever's other brands take away with the other