Background
Most women and girls have experienced some kind of negativity online and have found social media to be harmful to their self-esteem. Though only 9% of women in the early 2010s admitted to participating in body-shaming over social media, research found the actual percentage to be much higher. As a hygiene brand, Dove’s target market consists largely of women, so the company was concerned with women’s treatment of other women and themselves over social media.
#SpeakBeautiful Campaign
In 2015, Dove partnered with Twitter to launch their #SpeakBeautiful campaign in the aim of encouraging women and girls to alter the ways in which they speak about beauty over social media. This campaign was deemed to be a good way to increase body positivity after engaging in market research to determine what types of ads and campaigns would spark the most social commentary around this topic.
#SpeakBeautiful Effect
The #SpeakBeautiful Effect was a new technology that the company implemented following the #SpeakBeautiful campaign to give women and girls on Twitter more personalized insight into the potential emotional impact that their tweets could have on both themselves and others. Participants in the Effect would be able to publicly share their results in order to have a meaningful impact on their followers and future generations of social media users. First, users would retweet the invitation from Dove to join the campaign which would then allow the new technology to analyze 6 months worth of history per participant.
These are the four components of the #SpeakBeautiful Effect:
- Beauty Quotient analyzes a female user’s mood in conjunction with changes in tone during conversations regarding beauty in the aim of revealing which of around 45 emotions she most commonly expresses in these tweets.
- Defining Beauty looks at the words composing a female user’s beauty tweets and compares them against the words most commonly used both positively and negatively about female bodies and beauty.
- Time to #SpeakBeautiful was a component to the campaign that examines the times of day when a female user’s posts trend towards being more positive or negative.
- #SpeakBeautiful Together is a tool that reveals what percentage of tweets in each U.S. region are about body positivity in order to show users how the effect is successful in implementing change.
Impact
Before the #SpeakBeautiful campaign, around 5 million women on Twitter had put out posts with self-deprecating content. Along these same lines, the campaign led to almost a 40% decrease in negative conversation regarding female beauty on Twitter in one year. This case presents an excellent example of not only how marketing research can be used to make decisions about what changes need to be made by a company but also how marketing research can affect change in and of itself.
Post Inspiration: https://shortyawards.com/8th/dove-and-twitter-speakbeautiful-2
One reply on “Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful Campaign: A Marketing Strategy & A Step Towards Body Positivity on Twitter”
This is so interesting! I never knew Dove conducted such a campaign and I love how they involved their users in the market research process