Over the past year, there has been a refreshing change in the world of advertising. Instead of using skinny, size 6 models, Dove has decided to go for a more “normal” image.
It is one of the first brands to push for diversity and move away from the matchstick image of beauty in the media. The response was overwhelming. Women of all shapes and sizes, ages and race are finally able to feel good about themselves.
“My favourite part of the Dove campaign is one of the magazine strategies that features ‘letters from women who love their imperfections’,” said Dr Brenda Murphy, lecturer on gender and advertising studies at the University of Malta. “One woman wrote about the large scar on her stomach, in the shape of a star. This was a result of surgery she had as an infant, surgery that saved her life. Instead of a perfect body she has what some would describe as a ‘scarred’ one, but for her this scarred body is beautiful because it is a mark of her courage and a mark of the skill of the doctors who saved her life.”
One of the main aims of advertising is to make the consumer feel inadequate. Advertising campaigns play on women’s insecurity and feed this inadequacy by the models advertising the hundreds and thousands of products available on the market.
Dr Murphy pointed out that the ‘media generated’ and ‘socially reinforced’ myth of ‘ideal beauty’ has been criticised by thinking women through the decades. Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth in the 1900s generated much awareness among young women, and generated great resistance to the beauty and media industry at the time. Jean Kilbourne’s continuous educational mission to raise awareness on all advertising and the impossible standards of western, male values of beauty is taught in all courses that deal with ‘gender’ and media. “Now, Dove is giving young women a new message i.e. it is OK not to be a “perfect size 8 and the new positive message is that women are human, imperfect, beautiful and all different - let’s celebrate this.”
Before the campaign was launched, Dove commissioned a survey titled The Real Truth about Beauty: A Global Report. It was conducted by research firm StrategyOne in collaboration with Dr Nancy Etcoff and the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University and with the expert consultation of Dr Susie Orbach of the London School of Economics. The study is based on quantitative data collected from a global survey of 3,200 women from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States.
According to the results of the study, only five per cent feel comfortable describing themselves as pretty and a mere nine per cent feel comfortable describing themselves as attractive. Additionally, just 13 per cent of women say they are very satisfied with their beauty, 12 per cent say they are very satisfied with their physical attractiveness, 17 per cent are very satisfied with their facial attractiveness, and only 13 per cent are very satisfied with their body weight and shape. In fact, in a society captivated by diet and makeover programmes, a third of women around the world are very or somewhat dissatisfied with their body weight. The women of Japan have the highest levels of dissatisfaction at 59 per cent – followed by Brazil at 37 per cent, United Kingdom at 36 per cent, and the United States at 36 per cent, Argentina at 27 per cent and The Netherlands at 25 per cent.
Respondents said they felt the pressure to try and be that “perfect” picture of beauty:
• 63 per cent strongly agree that women today are expected to be more attractive than their mother’s generation.
• 60 per cent strongly agree that society expects women to enhance their physical attractiveness.
• 45 per cent of women feel that women who are more beautiful have greater opportunities in life.
The study concludes that the authentic beauty is “a concept lodged in women’s hearts and minds and seldom articulated in popular culture or affirmed in the mass media”. As such, it remains unrealised and unclaimed – an idea of beauty that is a narrower, functional definition of physical attractiveness.
The crux of the issue is what makes women feel good. One approach assumes that there are certain classic looks that all women would secretly love to possess. When a beautiful model promotes a brand, the audience responds as one hopes that the model’s magic will have rubbed off onto the product.
“I think Dove’s decision to radically change their marketing strategy was clever and welcome,” said Dr Murphy. “I just wonder what took the beauty industry so long to see such a gaping niche in the market.”
There is another school of thought which claims that modern self-confident women want to see figures and faces like their own celebrated in advertising. However, critics claim that on the whole, society and consumer culture push society to become more and not less obsessed with the pursuit of perfection.
However, Dr Murphy added that there is the need for more positive media campaigns, even if they are profit driven, “to reinforce the educational programmes that are ongoing around the world – and to begin to demolish some of the unrealistic images that surround us and ultimately damage us all – men and women alike”.