When we think of positive commercials, one that often comes up is Dove’s Self-Esteem campaign commercials. Watching these commercials, you would think that Dove is promoting self-acceptance, regardless of age, size, colour, and body shape. It suggests that our perception of beauty is distorted because advertisements feature beautiful models do not even look like themselves in real life. We are constantly bombarded with images of photo-shopped and edited pictures of women, and hold these images as ideals in society, when in reality this is not how many women look. Only a small amount of women look like the billboard ads; that leave a huge population who do not look them. So how do you target these women? But making them believe that Dove is a good company that promotes positive values, and encourages self-love. But, this is really just a marketing tactic rather than a value of Dove. They only continue to hide behind this campaign because it sells.
Dove is owned by Unilever, a world-wide company that produces and successfully markets many products including Dove, Slim Fast, Axe and Fair and Lovely. In Canada, everyone’s heard of Dove, they hold a large percentage of the beauty product markets. But halfway across the globe, the top selling face cream: Fair and Lovely, also owned by Unilever. It is a skin lightener, and the advertising it uses to sell the product often go along the lines of this: girl meets boy, boy does not like girl because she is very brown-skinned (dark), girl is sad, girl finds Fair and Lovely, uses it and boy meets girl and again, and boy falls in love this time. All the commercials of Fair and Lovely sell on the basis that your career, love life and social life will become better when you use Fair and Lovely and become lighter. In India, skin-tone discrimination exists very openly and subtly; from marriage proposals requesting light-skinned girls, to Bollywood, India favours lighter-skinned women over men. Because this inequality of better treatment of lighter-skined people exists in India, Unilever markets this – because it sells.
Unilever has marketed what sells; they don’t care about self-esteem, they just care about it in Canada because that’s what sells in Canada. If they were to play a Fair and Lovely commercial in India, I’m sure many people would stop using their other brands. They do not really value self-esteem and ‘true’ beauty; they just create a campaign that targets their audience most successfully. Next time you watch Dove’s Real beauty campaign, you have to wonder whose perception of beauty is really distorted.
Watch Dove’s Self Esteem Commercials Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6JvK0W60I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0IFBr1moiE
Watch Fair and Lovely Commercials Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNasbnw6HQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycDKRHg9sWE&feature=related
-Vaanmathy
Tags: Dove, Fair and Lovely, Speak Out, Unilever
