This week saw the release of another installment of Dove’s campaign for real beauty, a commercial entitled “Onslaught”
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Now before we get to the back-patting and congratulatory “we’re showing girls the truth and encouraging them to be happy with who they really are”, let’s get back to the fact that this is a video made by Dove to sell beauty products. And while Dove (and their parent brand Unilever) have taken some forward-thinking steps, does this make up for the fact that Unilever makes products to sell in different markets that reinforce negative female stereotypes?
Unilever owns about 400 brands, which, in addition to the United States, reach into South America, Europe, Africa and Australia, and as with any big business, it does whatever it needs to sell its products. And right now that means making sensitive, girl-as-victim advertising for women while simultaneously endorsing irresponsible sex-obsessed commercials aimed at men for products such as Axe. Or so their current behavior leads us to believe. The Campaign for Real Beauty has elevated the public’s opinion of the Dove brand. But can one brand excuse the actions of the other 399 Unilever brands?
Dove, like all other brands, is in the business of selling. The Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty” is most certainly a creative zig when all other beauty product marketing was zagging. While encouraging parents to talk to their children about issues like body image and the portrayal of women by media is most certainly a positive message, critics have cited that this also takes a very wide-spread problem and individualizes it, instead of pushing the people in power (advertisers, big corporations) to make more socially conscious decisions. And while Unilever is starting to make some body-image conscious decisions (like their pledge not to use size 0 models), at the end of the day, they are still trying to have women believe that their thighs need firming and their underarms need "fixing" so that people will buy their stuff.
Dove is undoubtedly one of the first brands that really effectively use this type of pseudo-feminism to sell products. But the uncritical embrace of these videos is unsettling, to say the least. At the end of the day, to everyone that’s not so blinded by the “goodness” of it all remembers that Doves message is really more along the lines of “The beauty industry holds up an unrealistic standard of beauty in order to sell you stuff. We, however, realize that you look like a normal person, and so we think you should buy our stuff in order to make yourself feel good.” Better? I’m not so sure…
Liz Kerner, Art Woman
