Dove “Beauty Sketches” adapted in China

Chinese people try to reach an ideal of beauty through surgery : Extension of the eyes, nose extension, breast augmentation, etc. They try all these surgeries to interventions to let them look more similar to the standard beauty according to the common society’s eyes.

In addition, in China, the fear of becoming a “spinster” is now purged. Many of them are desperate to find a husband to build a family before 26, hence the importance to be as beautiful as possible is no need to mention. Another drive for “face optimization” is the growing pressure in the career. More and more job seekers believe that face is one of the key factors that influence the result.

Here Dove took the advantage of this social subject for women to spread its message “Real Beauty for Real Women.” Thus placing itself as a spokes person for women, wishing to launch a debate on the concept of beauty, Dove realized after a study that 60% of Chinese women think to be beautiful but only 4% of them dare to say it in front of others.

Born Beautiful by Dove :

The goal of Dove and Ogilvy is to start a national debate on female beauty. Ensure that women speak against the new standards of beauty dictated by society that affect the image they have of themselves. Every woman must have her own definition of “real beauty” while positioning the Dove brand as its ally.

Thus the “Born Beautiful” campaign was born. The agency Ogilvy Shanghai invited a photographer and three artists to paint their pregnant belly shock sentences.

The objective is to show the issues, and problems of society those women will face after being born into this environment that China have today:

• “I am a girl who will soon join your world. While growing up I weigh 70kg or more, you will accept me anyway? “
• “I am a girl who will soon join your world. While growing up I have a flat nose, you accept me anyway? “
• “I am a girl who will soon join your world. If growing in my chest is a small A, do you accept me anyway? “

· a lot of people have responded: 83 million impressions, 263,000 posts, and nearly 10,000 users who took part in the discussion on Weibo.

Feeling that this was an important message, the audience felt concerned and has taken the game by sharing this campaign.

Following this campaign, Dove has a contemporary, dynamic, and relevant image. In addition, it is considered an ally and support for women.

Successful operation for Dove on the third largest global market for beauty and cosmetics, which by 2015 will reach over $ 34 billion!

Nice stories but what’s the reality?

It looks good, huh? That’s the information we can find in English and French, it’s all very well, but they seem to forget a small detail: have Chinese customers seen that?

Here’s the little research we made As they explained, there are 83 million impressions achieved, 263,000 posts made, and nearly 10,000 users engaged.

Usually, a campaign arouses over 10 million real impressions, which means there are really many people interested in that and thus, they will diffuse the information on other sites, blogs bbs, etc. So it’s supposed that the pictures can be found everywhere.

So, let’s check it on search engines and see the influence:

And there are 31 results found on Google hk and most of them are from adboardingpass， acquaint， damn-digital，blogspot. Good, they are blogs about advertising or blogs blocked in China. It means only “madmen” and foreigners talk about that. That’s the result we found on Google.

Maybe the result on Baidu will be different.

Exactly! The result on Baidu is totally different! There’s N O T H I N G  found on Baidu! (In China 80% of the people use Baidu to look for information and Baidu crawls more information in Chinese than the other search engines in China.)

The numbers on Weibo and the description of the idea of the campaign are really enchanting but compared with the budget, I’m afraid it won’t be enchanting but scary. However, if Dove is happy with the result, why bother showing them the hard fact they can be much better?

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