Reading Media: the Dove women

Dove, the soap and beauty product people, are making news with ads and commercials featuring several curvy, full-bodied young women wearing only their bras and panties. The product being sold is a line of “firming” lotions and creams that claim to reduce cellulite

The women are also attractive and young, the oldest being 26. They range in dress sizes from 6 to 14. A slogan accompanying the ad reads: “Let’s face it, firming the thighs of a size-2 supermodel is no challenge.”

In designing the ad to appeal to the target audience – young women with generous figures – the values used were sex, conflict, proximity, novelty and progress. (For explanation of these values, go to Reading Media at the Back Booth.)

Concerning sex, girls are girls and curves are curves, whether the girl is 5-6 and 110 pounds or 5-3 and 140. As long as she is reasonably attractive and reasonably young, readers and viewers will stop and look. Many women, and a lot of men, prefer curvier women, no matter what the prominence (celebrity) magazines say the norm is. Hopefully a future Dove sequence will feature curvy women in their 40s and 50s, but that would be too risky for a first effort, and also aimed at a less-attentive audience.

Conflict shows up when the curvy, normal group, looks at the slender, celebrity group, and thinks, “Hey, we’re in the magazine, we must be special, too.”

That triggers the emotional proximity value, appealing to curvy young women who see the ad and want to be as sexy, firm of thigh and appealing as the women in the ad. This is something new, or novel, in their lives, and they feel good about this “fresh” recognition.

It is novelty, mainly, that turned the ad into a news story. This is a change in the status quo. Dove took an unusual (though ultimately quite logical) direction in marketing a celebrity-based product to a demographic group that lacked desirability in the celebrity culture. There is also conflict, which shows up in the news story in reaction to the ad. Thus the ad has done its job twice: appealing to the target audience, and attracting the attention of a larger, general audience.

Ad effectiveness is also enhanced by media reactions such as this one, and also a column by Chicago Sun-Times writer Richard Roeper, who described the Dove women as “chunky.” Talk about conflict. He got 1,000 angry emails and wrote another column.

Carl’s Jr. scored the same way with its sex- and prominence-based Paris Hilton ad (she naked except for heels and a teeny bikini, washing a car) that was exactly the kind of commercial you would expect Carl’s Jr. to choose to persuade 14-to-25-year-old males to remember the brand the next time they want a hamburger.

It was also the kind of commercial that would make news with conflict, and it did create effective controversy in the news pages and programs. The esteemed media figure Tina Brown critiqued it as a “shoddy, shameless, plainly outrageous publicity stunt that all decent, right-thinking people will condemn.”

And well they might, though few among them will be 14-to-25-year-old males.