A Soap Company’s Dirty Tricks

Virginia Postrel slams Dove’s recent viral ad, seen above:

Dove’s “Real Beauty” ads have always treated women as dumb, or at the very least immature. They’ve always preached that adult women are typically obsessed with their looks and that recognizing flaws is the same as feeling hideous and miserable. They’ve always projected adolescent attitudes onto grownups while styling Dove as an enlightened savior.

This time, however, the brand made its condescension a little too clear, sparking a well-deserved firestorm of criticism.

“Shame upon you, Dove, for making these women seem dumb,” declared a New York Magazine piece, the headline of which called the video “garbage.” AdWeek asked, “Is Dove empowering women or calling them gullible?” Dove’s whole campaign, concluded the feminist website Jezebel, is “about teaching women that Dove knows better. Dove is smarter,” than its foolish customers. Jezebel tagged the post with the category “Badvertising.”

Danielle Kurtzleben explains how Dove ads became love-your-body campaigns:

In 2000, Dove parent company Unilever crafted a strategy plan called the “Path to Growth,” in which it cut down 1,600 brands to 400, according to a 2007 Harvard Business School case study from HBS Professor John Deighton. A few of the lucky surviving labels were selected to be what are called “Masterbrands” — brands that were “mandated to serve as umbrella identities over a range of product forms,” as Deighton puts it. Dove was one of them.

In other words, Dove would now make the jump from being just a soap to being a brand that covered all sorts of products: shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, and so on. And that jump into lotion and hair mousse is why Dove became synonymous with “real” women posing in their undies.

Update from a reader:

You should post a link to this hilarious new Dove parody ad (it’s new, not one of the ones from last year). Very good satire: