Dove Real Beauty Campaign Essay

Written Task 2
Esha Gogri

Outline:
1. Introduction
a. The question: How and why is a social group represented in a particular way in the text?
b. The approach: To introduce the text type, the Dove real beauty campaign and the main idea of it. To clearly state the ways in which the particular social group and represented and how.
2. Supporting idea 1
a. Describe the use and functions of the ad and who it targets
3. Supporting idea 2
a. Speak of the representation of the social group
b. Post feminism shown in the ad
4. Supporting idea 3
a. Speak of the main idea of the campaign and its goals
b. Analysis and evaluate if the social group being represented in this manner contradicts the main idea of the campaign and its goals
5. Conclusion

The only constant between the women is their all-white clothing. This may represent the diversity of beauty being differentiated through culture, power and status. The advertisement gives beauty the role as the dictator in a women’s self worth. The Dove vote ads for the campaign more explicitly show the same. The five vote advertisements feature portraits of five conventionally attractive women with one physical feature that could be seen as a flaw. For example one of the women has grey hair. The linguistic device used is opposing statements such as ‘flawed or flawless?’. The advertisement is put together in a way that implies its audience is meant to vote on if the women shown should be described positively or negatively. This is wrong and in fact deeply disempowering the women in the vote ads as they are being judged by their appearance. Another issue in the vote ads is the questions they ask. For example, one reads ‘Does true beauty only fit into size eight?’ This is phrased skillfully as it makes consumers consider current body sizes without defending or supporting any body type. This advertisement campaign is trying to show how the female driven brand, Dove, supports and acknowledges beauty in all shapes or

It does this by merely excluding images of any products. Being a brand with a great female consumer base, the advertisement cleverly targets their audience by focusing on laywomen. This is done in order to re-emphasize how female driven the brand is. This also brings to mind the idea of feminism and therefore the well being of women. The problem in the world today is that the media’s portrayal of beauty is unrealistic and unattainable. Dove is trying to break that. But in doing so, they are contradicting themselves. It is noble of the brand to want to redefine beauty in women if we believe their motivations are not profit driven. Dove’s campaign advertisement adopts feminist themes to sell their line of beauty products. However, in trying to break the beauty paradigm present in the media, Dove is promoting