Analysis Of The Dove Real Beauty Sketches

In 2013, the Dove Real Beauty Sketches was produced as part of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty marketing operation. Inspired by market research that only 4% of women think that they are beautiful, and around 54% of them are critical on how they look, the Unilever’s Dove brand started the campaign that aims to celebrate a woman’s natural beauty since 2005. In the video, an FBI forensic artist drew his subjects (a bunch of women) based on their description of themselves, with a curtain to separate them so as to not see each other. Afterwards, the same women were described by strangers who met them the previous day. The sketches were compared, revealing the stranger’s image more pleasing and accurate. The said film highlights the campaign’s

Seven prominent women were featured on the latter commercial, each of them acing on their own fields; DeGeneres on hosting, P!nk and Perry on singing, Becky G. on rapping, etc. The target audience, especially women, know that these personalities are much more trusted experts compared to those who were featured in Dove’s, subjects we barely even know. Based on this theory, COVERGIRL is much more likely to succeed in their attempts to persuade the audience.

Dove used narrative paradigm, which suggests that humans are storytellers and that we experience and understand the world as a series of narratives or stories . We can see clearly that the commercial follows a flow of story shaped by human experience, unlike COVERGIRL’s, where celebrities encourage through mere words and experiences on their own

The looking-glass self is the mental self-image we make from imagining how we look to another person, which was clearly tackled on the said commercial by the sad truth that most of the women think they do not look good enough in the eyes of other people. The generalized other, on the other hand, is the composite mental image a person has of his or her self based on societal expectations or responses, which also proved another sad truth that the women don’t perceive themselves as beautiful because [we can reckon] society has established a very discriminatory definition of beauty