Content area
Full Text
In 2006, personal care brand Dove launched an advertising campaign - "The campaign for real beauty" - in the USA. While most beauty and fashion advertisements exclusively cast thin, young and Caucasian models, Dove embarked on a different approach: They featured female models of a variety of sizes, ages and races. One woman had wrinkles and gray hair, another was a curvy size 14, and another still had dreadlocks and was of African descent ([1] Barry, 2007). Two months after the advertisements were unveiled, sales of the advertised product increased by 600 percent and the campaign received over 1,000 unpaid media features ([6] Simmons, 2006).
Given the success of these advertisements, Dove rolled out their "real beauty" campaign in China with Chinese models of diverse sizes and ages. Casting diversity again challenged advertising convention because most Chinese advertisements feature the same idealized Caucasian models found in Western ads ([3] Feng and Frith, 2008). Dove's campaign, however, produced the opposite result of its success in the West: "In China, 'real beauty' was a flop" ([4] Fowler, 2008), and Dove abandoned the advertisements after they failed to boost sales ([2] Bush, 2009). These negative results were especially concerning because China is expected to replace the USA as the world's largest consumer market by 2015 ([5] Kay, 2012).
The success of Dove's "real beauty" campaign in the USA and its failure in China suggests that marketers need to better understand what types of models motivate American and Chinese women. My research aimed to empirically explore their consumer response to models of different ages, sizes and races in advertising. I surveyed and then facilitated focus groups with over 3,500 women in Canada, the USA and China who ranged in age from 14 to 65, dress size from 0 to 18, and reflected a range of ethnicities. I recorded their responses to mock fashion ads - which I created specifically for my study - with models who varied in size, age and race but all wore the same dress.
I found that most brands currently misunderstand the mindset of North American and Chinese women. While advertisers typically execute a global advertising strategy and standardize models irrespective of...