Dove Case Analysis

DOVE CASE ANALYSIS

Marketing Management 902

Team 5

Ozgur Arslan

Michael Fischer

Mustafa Isik

Nigar Akhundova

Tahir Yumukoglu

Dove and Unilever

Dove was the world’s number one “cleansing” brand in 2007. Competing in health and beauty sector, Dove’s sales were over $2 Billion a year and the products were sold in more than 80 countries all around the World. The categories that the brand competed were cleansing bars, body washes, hand washes, face care, hair care, deodorants, antiperspirants and body lotions. The rival brands in these categories are P&G’s Ivory, Kao’s Jergens and Beiersdorf’s Nivea.

Unilever, one of the leading global manufacturer of packaged consumer goods, being food, home and personal care sectors. Global brands of Unilever, like Knorr, Omo, Lux, Becel and 7 others had revenues over a billion dollar, where total annual revenues of all the brands add up to $50 billion. The other giants competing in the market such as Nestle, P&G and Kraft foods have annual revenues of $69 billion, $68 billion and $34 billion respectively.

The company was founded in 1930 with the merger of Dutch margarine company Unie and UK based Lever Brothers. British colonial and Dutch trading heritage helped the company to be one of the leading multinationals, operating in every continent. Where being global and active in various markets helped them to generate revenues, it also created some operational difficulties at the same time.  

Overall Summary

Dove was launched in 1957 with the claim that it treated the dry skin. It refused to call itself soap until 2000 and emphasize the product’s moisturizing benefits. For over 40 years, except some minor changes, Dove stayed with the same advertising and product positioning strategy. In February 2000, Unilever developed a concept called Masterbrand and chose Dove to lend its name to Unilever entries in personal care categories. They decided to build a common point of view for the Masterbrand, instead of underlying functional superiority, because functionality meant different thing in different categories. And story of “The Campaign for Real Beauty” began.

Dove began to build infrastructure of the campaign by gathering data from the target customers, which are women of every shape, size, color and nationality. They made a survey with 3,000 women in 10 countries, and assess the results with two famous psychologists. The most remarkable finding from the survey was only 2% of the respondents described themselves as beautiful.

According to the results of surveys, Dove decided to change the way society views beauty. They generated two advertisement series. The first was “outsized or outstanding” ad, and the next was representing six real curvy women cheerfully posing in white underwear. In both ads, Dove was focusing that the society was portraying an unattainable and stereotypical image of beauty and this leads to a lack of self-esteem among women. They aimed to improve self-esteem and make more women feel beautiful by broadening the narrow definition of beauty, “young, white, blonde, and thin”.

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