7 Branding lessons from the Dove campaign

Marketing can be a lot like surfing.  The brand surveys contemporary
culture as if it were the surf off Australia’s Gold Coast, looking for
the perfect wave. 

In the early oughts (probably 2003), Unilever made an extraordinary
discovery.  A global research project told them that of the 3200 women
they had surveyed, only 64 of them (or 2%) were prepared to call
themselves beautiful.  Seventy-six per cent of the respondents wanted
the idea of beauty to change. 

Unilever decided to make itself that change agent:

The Dove mission is to widen the definition of beauty.  The Campaign for Real Beauty is based on a belief that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes, ages and that real beauty can be genuinely stunning.  (Verkade in Lichti, below) 

The Dove campaign for Real Beauty launched in 2004.

Yesterday, I talked about the Dove campaign…because Virginia Postrel
had done so.  But in truth I had wanted to talk about this campaign for
a long time. 

After all, the Dove campaign for real beauty is a great example of
marketing that works with contemporary culture, not against it.  Dove
was prepared to capture the tremendous energy coming off a trend that
many brands just looked through or tried to work around.  In point of
fact, ideas of femaleness had been "under review" and deeply contested
in our society at least since the ideas of Susan B. Anthony.  The tide
had come and gone several times by 2003 and now it appeared to be
prepared to transform our culture’s most fundamental ideas of what
beauty is. 

Brands that surf culture have to choose their moment with exquisite
timing.  If they are a moment too soon, they look like reckless "kooks"
way out ahead of the trend.  The brand will pay for it.  The brand
manager’s career will pay for it.  On the other hand, if they wait too
long, they are going to look like johnnies-come-lately playing me-too
marketing.  March can be too early and May too late.  April is the sweet spot between ridicule
and scorn. 

We can’t know what was going on within Dove, but we may assume that
Unilever marketers were monitoring several diverse developments in
contemporary culture, everything from the Boston "our bodies,
ourselves" collective founded in 1970 to Anna Nicole Smith, the
voluptuous celebrity who died tragically in 2007 through the TV show Sex in the City.  (We can’t say that
the head’s up came from the 2003 research project.  Something had to inspire the project.) 

But the moment that Dove decided to get on board was the moment that
the trend took on an extraordinary ally.  Using the creative talent at
the brand’s disposal and the deep pockets at Unilever, there was now a
mainstream champion of a new definition of beauty.  At some point,
Oprah came on board.  The fitness studio Curves was established.
Special K got in on the action.  (We must hope for a clarifying
history here.)  And before very long, the beauty hegemony of Vogue and
the Hollywood Studio was being challenged.  A nascent, distributed, but
deeply unofficial unhappiness with beauty concepts suddenly was given a
voice and a profile.

There is a bargain at work here, a trade.  In order to get access to
the power and the authenticity of the new beauty movement, Dove makes
available its marketing cunning and check book.  To get access to Dove’s cunning and check book, the trend makes available its power and authenticity.   Intellectuals are fond of talking about how capitalism corrupts culture, but this bargain looks like a pretty good one.  Both parties prosper.

Seven branding lessons of the Dove campaign

1. Survey the world.  Get to know the  culture. 

2. Discover the trend or the impulse that could serve the brand.

3. Assess the downside risks to which the brand is exposed.

4. Establish a time table that shows the growth of the trend.

5. Establish the moment to get in.

6. Partner with the enthusiasts of the trend.

7. Make your move (repeat steps 1 through 6)

References

Anonymous.  n.d., History of Our Bodies Ourselves and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.  here. 

Clegg, Alicia. 2005. Dove Gets Real.  Brandchannel.com.  April 18, 2005. here. 

Lichti, Shirley.  2006.  Dove Campaign reflects a beautiful strategy.  The Record.  June 21, 2006. here. 

McMains, Andrew.  2007.  $70 mil. Weight Watchers in Play.  Adweek.  February 14, 2007.  here.  [The Watchers went into play today, with $70 million at stake, and WPP Group's Young and Rubicam the incumbent.  Dove will has changed the landscape in which the winning agency and this brand must work.]

Piper, Tim, Yael Staav, Mark Wakefield, Sharon MacLeod, Stephanie
Hurst. 2005.  Dove Film.  as posted on YouTube, September 5, 2005. here.  [This short film appears to compile clips from ethnographic interviews
with girls 7-17 roughly.  Captures the pressures on young women to lose
weight.]

Traister, Rebecca.  2005.  "Real beauty" — or really smart marketing.
Dove has a worthy new ad campaign that tells women to embrace their
curves. Too bad they’re hawking cellulite cream.  Salon.  July 22,
2005.  here. 

Originally from This Blog Sits at the by Grant McCracken
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 10:00PM

WOW in real life!

German artist Aram Bartholl did a “World of Warcraft” performance in public space where he had his name follow him over his head. Watch the video above.. he also recently did more of these installations in Gent, Belgium at the Vooruit. See pics . I also did an interview with Bartholl for Gizmodo that can be read here. [blogged by Jonah on coin operated]

Virtualizing the Physical by Greg L: We’ve had several discussions in the past about comingling virtual world technologies with physical spaces to form augmented realities. (E.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) To give credit where it’s due, Jerry Paffendorf has often chimed in with some great links and interesting comments on this topic. (E.g. 1, 2, 3) From time to time, we’ve also discussed the increasing technological viability of virtual-real mashup games like Human Pac-Man. Continue reading “Virtualizing the Physical” on Terra Nova

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 10:52PM

Turbulence Spotlight:

Algorithmic Montage 2: A Walk with David Bohm

Turbulence Spotlight: Algorithmic Montage 2: A Walk with David Bohm by David Crawford :: Needs Flash player.

“David Joseph Bohm (born December 20, 1917 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, died October 27, 1992 in London) was an American-born quantum physicist, who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project.” (Wikipedia) The audio in this video comes from an interview that F. David Peat conducted with David Bohm.

David Crawford studied film, video, and new media at the Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997. In 2004, he received an MSc from Chalmers University of Technology. Crawford is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Göteborg University, Sweden.

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 16, 2007, 3:40PM

Cities as Billboards

The train of thought that I started as I discussed Fabien Girardin’s Flickr heatmaps a few posts back, and which led me to thinking about mining consumer line-of sight data to target advertising, seems to be continuing here in a recent New York Times article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider "unsold" space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam.

But why just post the same ad for everyone to see?   Why not use an individual viewer’s line of sight as they travel as a "channel" into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists? Fabien’s recent post, illustrated here,  shows the "traces" left by Flickr photographers as they transit  Barcelona. Where his heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city, or his visual corridor, if you will.

Originally from Smartspace by Scott Smith
reBlogged by michael on Jan 17, 2007, 6:41PM

Sugar with everything

Sugar Rush is a fascinating, terrifying and important Guardian Special Report about sugar in food. Sugar is so addictive it should be classified, says the British Medical Journal, as a hard drug. The immediate pleasure it gives us soon leads to much less pleasant things — tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, cancer, depression and anxiety. More and more of the food we eat — even fresh fruit and vegetables and savoury stuff — is, basically, turning into sugar. Whether we choose to eat the stuff or not, it’s everywhere, bred into crops and brewed into beer and sprinkled into cooking and stuffed into every plastic-wrapped package lying in wait for you at the late-night grocery. There’s more of it in more products than there was even in the early 1990s. It’s there for commercial reasons. We like it, we buy it.

Read the article yourself — I did, while sucking on a marzipan potato. What I want to single out and pick up on today is just one quote that pops up half way through, a quote I found very interesting, very symptomatic. A “sugar apologist” is speaking, an executive who worked for Cadbury Schweppes for 23 years before becoming a market researcher. Colin Gutteridge is explaining the “taste evolution” towards today’s sugar-with-everything world.

“I remember being presented with yoghurt for the first time when I was nine,” Gutteridge says. “It was acidic and I thought it was repulsive. If there is a trend over the past 100 years it is taking products that are marginal in taste and making them more acceptable to a wider range of people by adding in sweetness. Does any of this matter? Personally, I don’t think so. Without it I would never have enjoyed yoghurt.”

Now, never mind sugar, what Gutteridge is describing could as well be the story of indie bands signing to major labels, or New Labour. It’s the application to the food world of the old question “what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” Let’s look at Gutteridge’s argument more closely.

1. Yoghurt is acidic, repulsive.
2. Sugar is pleasant, popular.
3. Yoghurt is marginal.
4. Sugar is central.
5. If we put sugar in yoghurt, it can become central, mainstream.
6. Therefore, by adding sugar, we can help people to enjoy yoghurt, and help yoghurt to go mainstream. Everyone wins!

But here are the contradictions Gutteridge doesn’t seem to see in his argument:

7. Is this sweetened yoghurt still yoghurt? Isn’t it just sugar posing as yoghurt?
8. If you believe yoghurt is essentially repulsive, why help people to enjoy it in the first place? Why not just eliminate it?

I think these last two questions raise troubling thoughts about democracy, consumerism, the free market and other systems that purport to give people what they want. People usually want things that stimulate them in the most stupid and obvious ways. Like rats in a lab experiment, we’ll push the button that gives us orgasm, or money, or a sugary snack. Given half a chance, we’ll push it until it kills us. We sort of know this, and we sort of feel guilty. Rather than gulping down pound bags of sugar all day, we try to balance our diets, eat healthy things like vegetables and yoghurt. If those things also turn out to have sugar in them, well, at least it’s a blend of the palatable and the virtuous. We did try.

The system doesn’t really want to change, but it does want to think well of itself. So, instead of revealing its monopoly face and just showing us its addictive trade in drugs and sugar and arms and energy (and in the case of sugar it was a brutal slave trade), it shows us a diverse system in which lots of healthy things are also for sale — yoghurt and indie pop and intelligent literature — and in which the Labour party can sometimes come to power rather than the business-friendly Conservatives. And yet, when you look closer, you find that the Labour Party has come to power at the price of expunging Clause 4 of its constitution — the idea that the goal of the party is to secure for workers the full fruits of their labour. That’s the core DNA of the Labour movement, its “yoghurt”.

The price of success is often the complete destruction of all otherness, all identity, all soul, all flavour, all texture. And yet success on those terms isn’t success at all. It’s a kind of possession, a capitulation. Nothing fails like success. By failing to provide a real alternative, by giving the public only what it thinks it wants, you’re failing them as well as yourself. Instead of giving them the full fruits of their labour, you offer them a fruit stuffed full of sugar.

Originally from Click opera
reBlogged by michael on Feb 16, 2007, 10:50AM

Funky Little Shack

[Image: Courtesy of the Art Shanty Projects, via Metropolis].

Though it’s hidden behind a subscriber-only link, I’ve got a short article in the new issue of Metropolis. So if you’re standing in the check-out line at the supermarket and you need something to read…

[Image: Courtesy of the Art Shanty Projects, via Metropolis].

“For the past four winters,” the article goes, “a kind of sci-fi skid row has sprung up on the temporarily frozen surface of Medicine Lake, in the western suburbs of Minneapolis.”
The structures have all been put there by the Art Shanty Projects, an “annual folk-architecture experiment” that now “features nearly two dozen cabins – each a unique variation on the traditional Minnesotan ice-fishing shed.”
Organized and run by Peter Haakon Thompson and David Pitman, this instant city on ice – part community festival, part architectural happening – includes a long list of participating artists and their often wildly different little buildings.

[Image: Courtesy of the Art Shanty Projects, via Metropolis].

There are teahouses and karaoke rooms, a pinhole camera shanty and a place to knit scarves; there’s a functioning post office, a shack for misfit toys, and even a science shanty “themed around limnology – the study of lakes.”
But one of my favorites this year is actually the shanty in which you can “engage the community in a conversation about… cactus.”
Last winter, the shanties included a structure made of ice shells by the folks behind Materials & Applications; there was an artificial drumlin; and there was a “work of art” produced by local high school students – who also supplied this memorable description of the event itself: the Art Shanty Projects is a “five-week exhibition of architecture, performances, science, art, zombies, spear-fishing, videos, robots, pinhole cameras, sculpture, knitting, readings and karaoke.”
There was even a glass-blowing shanty and a peepshow on ice.

[Image: Courtesy of the Art Shanty Projects, via Metropolis].

However, if you’re hoping to see the shanties in action, be aware that they’ll be dismantled on February 17th – three days from now. So hurry.
Otherwise, check out the Art Shanty Projects webpage for more info; and pick up a copy of Metropolis if you stumble upon one.

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM

The Fine Art of Context Creation

Last week I heard Sara Diamond, President of Ontario College of Art & Design, talk about The Fine Art of Context Creation: Cross-Disciplinary Methods in New Media. Here’s some of what I heard:

Artists

• Artists are social critics & lateral thinkers that identify and fill in gaps in tool kit.
• They develop their own tools and fill gaps in dominant tool systems, which often results in pushing technology & science forward.
• Do it for selfish reasons: want to make something but the technology is not there.

Designers

• Designers sniff the zeitgeist. They have a “trained” gut feel.
• Designers also push technologies but they are more process based: understand the user, understand materials
• Designers are eager for stuff to work (generalization). They really care if things works (unlike artists).
• Represent a productive mix of optimism & pessimism; mix of pushing boundaries & containment

Contemporary Context Demands Cooperation

• A co-reliance of knowledge is needed for developing solutions
• Need to bring processes and knowledge together to achieve viable prototypes
• Boundary Objects are gifts between cultures, terms that are redefined through collaboration or emergent use
• Taught to approach problems in different ways in science, engineering, and design
• Our challenge is not the technology but the communication between people.
• Leadership needs to shift within teams based on tasks
• Share physical & network process+ spaces
• People like structures and will do incredible things with them
• Method 1: Participatory Design
• Method 2: Rapid Prototyping
• Method 3: Take things out to the public
• Really important for engineers to engage with the design process
• Important for designers to understand how hard it is to build things

Tags: collaboration, context, process

Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by LukeW
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM

Like Watching Paint Dry. Really Beautiful Paint.

Just got a press release from The Exploratorium (the best place on earth, btw, period), announcing the win of an AIA award for the design of the “Wave Wall,” a kinetic skin on the surface of the new Science Education Center at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, Louisiana. Super-apt for its context of course, but there was only a small pic in the email. Hopped over to YouTube, did a search, and presto. You get some Rockettes-style action at the 2:30-minute mark, but we suspect that this thing is even more wonderful when it’s only slighly moving. [more]

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Feb 16, 2007, 4:35PM

Churches of remathematization

[Image: "Adams in Saint Flour Cathedral," a 360°x180° panorama by Seb Przd].

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.

[Images: "Saint Etienne Two Times," taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].

Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot “Treppe.”
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including “On the side of the cathedral,” “Don’t drink and pray,” and “Notre-Dame de Reims.”
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within…
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.

[Image: "The Ceiling and Columns of the Cathedral" by Seb Przd].

(Discovered via MetaFilter).

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM

Eco-Living: The Best of TreeHugger

Ready to take the plunge (or maybe just tiptoe) into a greener existence? TreeHugger’s latest additions to the How to Green Your Life series include the need-to-know for greening your furniture, cleaning, women’s personal care, recycling, and the dishwasher.

The computer in front of you works as hard as you do, which means it gobbles up a lot of power. Here are some ways to make computer use more energy efficient.

GIGO is short for “garbage in, garbage out,” and it’s the philosophy behind GigoIt.com, a stuff redistribution hub with freecycle-ish overtones.

Tech Networks of Boston is a small company with a simple but big idea: a desktop computer that uses 25% less energy, is less toxic, and is more recyclable.

The Zoomy Global Warming Newsreader is an RSS-based site that floats climate news right past your face.

H&R Block doles out free advice on snagging that hybrid car tax credit.

Howtopedia puts the power of the wiki to work as a collaborative library for DIY-ers, covering everything from home energy projects to how to live greener.

TreeHugger takes a jaunt through some basic moves to help create better indoor air quality for office monkeys like us.

Green social networking is getting big: people linking with people around environmental values.

Originally from Lifehacker
reBlogged by michael on Feb 7, 2007, 11:30PM