1. What is a brand? Why does Unilever want fewer of them?

A brand can be defined as the customers experience (physical/psychological) of a product, formed by

perceptions and thoughts about the seller. A brand helps to distinguish the product or service from its
competitors or other brands. A brand can be used to represent a product or group of similar products or even
all the products that the company produces.

In February 2000, Unilever embarked a five-year strategy to reduce the number of brands from 1600 to 400
and named it as “Path to Growth”. The main idea behind this movement was to focus on the brands they
want to evolve as “Masterbrands” which will serve as an umbrella to the range of products that sell under
them.
Limitations of Global decentralization began to increase when the company’s product portfolio expanded
globally. Same product was sold with checkered identities in different parts of the world. For instance,
Unilever produced ice cream under Wall’s brand in the U.K and Asia, Ola in the Netherlands, Kibon in Brazil,
Breyers in the USA etc. Reducing the number of brands will give Unilever more control over their brands,
brand management and ensure each product receives attention and recognition for the development of the
brand. Also, it will give Unilever the ability to concentrate on the global market and build the brand around it
which will finally result in higher revenue.

2. What are people saying about “dove”?

Dove is seen using their social media handles not just to sell and advertise their products, but to change the
way our society talks about beauty. Thus, positioning themselves as a self-esteem and body positivity
boosting brand. By promoting social and emotional benefits of the brand on digital platforms makes them not
to appear as regular advertisements.
Dove has strong command in Social networking platforms with their official Facebook page having
approximately 30 million followers which shows how the customers are connected to Dove. Dove has around
70% positive customers in all e-commerce sites.

1
 Image – Dove’s social media presence

Some of the opinions on social media and internet are as follows:

 Value for money product: Dove soaps are priced slightly higher than its competitors. But consumers
didn’t mind spending those extra bucks as it provided the unique moisturizing experience.

 Changing the definition of beauty: One of the greatest achievements of the Dove campaign is that it
initiated a global conversation to widen the definition of beauty. Dove changed the culture of
advertising by challenging beauty stereotypes; they selected real women whose appearances are
outside the stereotypical norms of beauty (e.g., older women with wrinkles, overweight women).

2
  Hypocrisy: A section of online users called out for Dove’s hypocrisy when they identified the fact that
Unilever is also the parent company of brands like Fair & lovely and Axe. These brands promote
messages that are in direct contradiction to the message that Dove is attempting to promote, which
is positive body image.

 Dove’s reputation crisis on social media: Dove posted an ad for Dove body wash which showed a
black woman removing her top to reveal a white woman. The crisis started when the makeup artist
Naomi Blake put screen grabs of the clip together and shared them to Facebook.

The post got shared 10K times and almost 45% mentions had a negative sentiment. More than 12,000 posts
mentioned Dove with variants of the word “racist”. The issue lasted for close to a week until other things
started getting attention.

3. What are the different types of interaction customer does with dove brand? And suggest measures
how the brand management team can utilize this for the benefit of brand.

Tick-box campaign, Firming campaign, the campaign for Real Beauty & Billboard campaigns are some of the
notable brand promotion campaigns launched by Dove. Some of the measures to improve their digital
interactivity –

 Identify the keywords related to self-esteem issues in women from different backgrounds and
strategically place Dove campaigns in such pages which would help the user to reach Dove’s website
and in-turn changing their negative opinions

3
  Launch email campaigns to newsletter subscribers to provide beauty tips and inform about their
upcoming product campaigns.

Ex: Dove has been running a campaign called #SelfEsteemProject. Email campaign helps in reaching
to the customers with less cost and in short span of time

 Create innovative ad campaigns (content marketing) which portrays the brand values and attracts
the customers, that results in higher CTR (clickthrough rate)

 Though Dove’s ‘campaign for real beauty’ was highly successful, they partially failed to connect their
advertisements to purchase intention. Hence, they should focus on getting the balance between
product attributes and brand objective

 Dove’s advertising should take cultural values into consideration when targeting different regions,
especially women in collectivist culture like China and individualistic culture like the USA

 Dove is active on social media platforms and they can start Google ads to keep their campaigns
running through display ads and video ads without diverting from their values

Suggested measures will help Dove to build loyalty and brand attachment amongst a wider population as well
as grow their brand awareness and revenue.

********************************END OF THE REPORT*********************************