THE REAL WOMEN CAMPAIGN- TRUE OR LIE? Blog 1

The “real women” campaigns that have suddenly become THE trend in marketing, is it really brands and companies paying attention to what the consumer really wants to see, hear and purchase, or is it just extremely clever advertising?

Having photographs on print based adverts looking natural with no make up, or slightly touched up, seeing women in all of her glory rather than the perfect outline of what the perfect woman should look like in a figure hugging dress. Capturing a woman, or group of women together displaying their true beauty and perfectness of their imperfections is what we want to see.

This can be seen throughout any aspects of beauty whether its advertising clothes, having the clothes modelled on slimmer bodies, and advertising make up. Lingerie, shoes, you name it anything to do with making a woman look good has been tampered with whether its in the preproduction stage, production stage or post-production stage, which usually involves a heavy amount of photoshop. Unfortunately we do not see anything that hasn’t been modified, even an image that looks natural and real has had something done to it.

However, there are some marketing campaigns and adverts that have played on this ‘wanting the real’, and have embarked on a direction to captivate woman audiences.

The most famous advert campaign is ‘Dove’, with it’s slogan ‘real women’.  Launched in 2004, and aimed to give women confidence about their bodies and how they look, it was celebrated by woman and the fashion and beauty world as THE step forward for proper heart to heart with women and what they want. 

  The beauty product company Dove sells skin, hair and body products, anything from lotions, creams, deodorant and so on. With the pictures used for their campaign ‘real beauty’ was shot by photographer Rankin, this did not only give the campaign true edge to it’s images, but a sense of truth. Rankin is known for his natural beauty look in his work, which made the campaign for Dove even more real. 

With it’s campaign, Dove set out to show women that they can look naturally beautiful without all the mess of using lots of products, if they used their products. By using for instance a face cream, it would make your skin look smooth, youthful and healthy, without using lots of foundation and skin makeup in order to look gorgeous.

I admit that if a product makes you feel fresh, relaxed and it smells nice we tend to just give into the product and tell ourselves that it says what it tells us on the label or the adverts. Whether the products of Dove helps, was not the message of the campaign. It was mainly about confidence in natural beauty, and if women use Dove’s products, they will feel confident too. 

This was the true big step for a lot of industries, and really set the pace for other ‘real women’ campaigns to follow in the coming years. Despite not using Dove products at all, I was impressed by their massive marketing of it, and the diversity of ages, colours and types of beauty they displayed. 

Whether this again was intentional advertising, or really doing a heart to heart with the customers, we will never know.