‘Love thyself, for thou art beautiful’ – seems to be Dove’s new commandment of self-esteem and beauty.
The personal beauty care brand’s on-going campaign for real beauty has helped the women of the world to realize that they are more beautiful than they think. As a result, the ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ video which depicts a forensics artist doing two sketches each for seven different women to portray the difference between how they describe themselves and how a random stranger describes them, was a runaway hit and went viral within the first week it was launched.
In a new report, Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company from New York, analyzes the social media performance and strategy behind the Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign.
The ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ video was uploaded to Dove’s US YouTube channel on April 14 and the video has more than 35 million views as of April 30. As shown below the upward trend began on April 16 and the video had an incredible 2.7 million views between April 16 and 17.
Dove’s YouTube channel had a staggering video views growth rate of 2177%, which is hundred and forty five times the average views growth rate of the personal care sector during the time period analyzed.
The video and the message won the hearts of many as evinced by the huge spike in the growth of subscribers to Dove’s YouTube channel.
Dove’s YouTube channel’s subscriber base grew at the rate of 1953%, which is more than three hundred times the average subscriber growth rate of the Personal Care sector during the time period analyzed.
Apart from their YouTube channel, Dove also utilised their Facebook page really well to promote and create buzz around the campaign. Other than just posting the video, Dove engaged with its fans by posting pictures and updates around the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign like the ones below which created more fan engagement than usual.
During the time period analyzed, Dove posted a total of 82 posts out of which 18 posts were related to the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign and these posts engaged much better with Dove’s fans than the other posts.
The 140 characters format also worked well for Dove in creating buzz around the brand and the campaign as Dove’s fans used Twitter to reveal how much they were touched by the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign and Dove used the hashtag #WeAreBeautiful to promote the campaign.
Dove’s Twitter strategy had an interesting angle to it. Dove randomly replied to women, who are tweeting about how bad they look, with a positive message conveying the fact that they are more beautiful than they think. This kind of real time communication not only creates buzz but also brings the brand and the consumer much closer to each other.
Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign shows how well Dove knows its customers and is able to connect with them by sending out a message that resonates with them. But the key takeaway here is how Dove effectively executed the campaign using a well-planned social media strategy across different channels.
Methodology:
Unmetric compiled the report by sourcing data from its own social media benchmarking platform. Data and Insights on Dove’s activities on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were analyzed for the month of April 2013.