Teema

Sawas
Professor Christen Enos
First Year Writing
February 3, 2016

Women and Society: An Uneven Battle

Advertising is ubiquitous, directly and indirectly. It is a form of communication that allows
for a message or purpose to be spread to a certain audience. If utilized appropriately,
advertisements are an influential tool. They have the ability to induce the audience to think,
believe and consequently act a certain way. Since advertisements communicate exclusive
messages or stories, the audience must initially understand advertisement through
analyzing it comprehensively. This can be done through the production of the advert,
purpose, the target audience, the characters, the verbal text and forms of communication.

Todays society and and social media represent women in an approach that shed extreme
light on skewed perception of beauty. The perpetual stereotypical mythologies of being
impossibly tall, white and thin that women see in advertising are mounting resulting in
women identifying themselves in a negative manner. Dove, however, defies these myths,
and through their array of campaigns, they fortify the notion that beauty is more than
merely appearance. Their definition of beauty can be seen through diversity, aging, and
curves. Dove is a renowned brand personal care brand and has placed a significant footstep
in the social media world since starting their campaign for real beauty in 2004. Ever since I

can remember, Dove adverts have enticed me to feel comfortable in my skin because the
brands rooted origin is having the ability to make women feel strong and beautiful through
a short clip, using their rudimentary commodity product, a soap. Because of their
connecting messages to their audience, Ive decided to analyze their #SpeakBeautiful
campaign and the utilization of social media. This campaign features Doves collaboration
with Twitter to make social media a more cordial outlet for women, where they can
express their feelings about their image in a more positive approach. This campaign is
founded around one alarming statistic, in 2014, Women sent over 5 million negative
tweets about beauty and body image. This campaign abducts the audiences attention by
exhibiting this commercial in an unparalleled format. It opens up with the domino-effect of
self-abusive comments on Twitter, while ultimately affirming that it only takes one
positive Tweet to start a new trend. The application of a chain reaction manifests the idea
of the cumulative effect produced when one image-shaming tweet is sent, setting of an
entire chain of parallel events.

Advertising a product usually acquires one aim, selling products. However, even though
Dove is trying reaching out to their audience to buy their products to make them feel and
look better, they simultaneously commit to make women appreciate their true beauty, and
feel confident about their natural identity and beauty. With many women perceiving
themselves in a negative way, the exigency for change is needed, and through Doves
#SpeakBeautiful Campaign they aim to achieve this. This commercial is aimed to help
change the way this generation as well as the future perceive themselves. The utilization of
the hashtag #SpeakBeautiful is meant to encourage positive body image on social media

as well as request women to reflect the power that one single social media post has. The
#SpeakBeautiful campaign uses technology to identify negative tweets about beauty and
body image. Accordingly, Dove would flag those negative tweets and respond with a
positive note from experts. This creates an intimate, on-on-one relationship between Dove
and the women.

Dove has adapted its advertisement campaign to reach its female audience of all ages by
utilizing real life situation to educate women on the true meaning of beauty and confidence.
Dove has positioned itself chiefly towards women, especially women who perceive
themselves as undervalued. Thus they focus their products on women who use beauty
products to feel and look better. The target market can be reinforced using the text
incorporated in the video, Last year women sent over 5 million negative tweets about
beauty and body image. This campaign reaches a sprawling scope of audience, because the
perception of beauty and its negative association is conventional.

The Dove Beauty Campaign uses several rhetorical appeals, pathos, ethos and logos in
order to market Dove Beauty Products to women of all ages. Since Doves establishment as
a personal care brand, and not a beauty brand, they are able to dig deep into the rhetorical
element of ethos. They display themselves as an ethical brand, with the liability to project
females as distinctive and beautiful in their natural form. Their note to their audience is to
love oneself and to leave a more encouraging impact on society. And through this
campaign, Dove is able to present its audience with saddening facts about how people view
themselves. This is however an indirect marketing practice used to allude consumers to

buy their products. The employment of ethos can be since through its collaboration with
Twitters illustrious prominence to propel its status of a loyal brand and to enhance its
reputation to make its market feel comfortable with their natural beauty and body image.
Additional custom for Dove to use ethos is through the utilization of candid tweets of real
life problems in their campaign, accomplishing a more credible interior for the campaign.
All these women tweeting have experienced pain or are perceiving others in a adverse way.

Dove additionally uses strong appeal to logos to out forth its argument, with statistical
analysis. They candidly display how undesirably women distinguish themselves and
others: Last year women sent over 5 million negative tweets about beauty and body
image. This statistic logically supports Doves missions that beauty perception is a real and
severe problem. The specific number of 5 million build an appeal to logos, and affect the
audience in a way that confirms to them that this is an issue. The logos is hidden in the
concept that women in todays society perceive their individuality as unattractive, and are
attacking one another to make themselves merely feel better. Doves collaboration with
Twitter is a mammoth step in changing womens perception of beauty and attempts to offer
a solution to help women distinguish themselves as beautiful, through the identification of
adverse tweets, subsequently responding to those tweets with an encouraging and
animated message. However, are women going to be convinced that easily? Even if they
appreciate their approach to beauty and encouragement of perceiving their identity in a
beautiful approach, some women would still want products to feel and look more beautiful.

Grasping the context of this advertisement is central to fully hold on to knowing how
pathos plays a vital function in this rhetorical situation, and its production of immediate
results. This brief but enthralling commercial uses Twitter to broaden Doves consumer
and rhetorical audience, to grasp the audience with a persuasive amount of pathos to shift
adverse associations away from its merchandises, and to promote its brand by aligning
Dove with the creation of a confidence and self-esteem. Dove is taking advantage of
societys cumulative identification of how conventional beauty is an artificial
establishment. This is apparent through the personal stories of women, and reflects how
todays culture observes beauty. The commercials use of pathos allows Dove to stretch its
audience to not only females with self doubt expressed on social media, but to all genders
facing the fear of not living up to a certain myth of beauty, that is truthfully unrealistic. This
campaign metaphorically extends a hand to all the women feeling the same way as the
women from the tweets. The aesthetics of the campaign additionally supports and
strengthens the usage of pathos. By having the brand adopt tranquil music in the
background creates a sentimental, as well as nostalgic tone in order to attract the audience
going through the same experience and create longingly remembering that women should
stop self-harm and start perceive themselves as beautiful. Nonetheless, it can be seen as a
marketing stunt to lull customers into a convincing state, making them forget Doves actual
aim of selling you their products. The introduction is packed of emotionally-charged diction
that produce a sympathetic representation. Opening with a real life events of the challenges
women face, I HATE MY BODY, I have so much cellulite its DISGUSTING, She is SO
UGLY, the campaign proximately forms its pathetic appeal, as those hurtful comments
emotionally absorbs the audience, producing a poignant and eloquent scenario. All of these

phrases evoke harmful emotions, reinforcing the sympathetic feeling. Dove uses these
tweets as an unspoken technique deployed to embellish the impact of the message they
want to convey. But how well does this campaign utilize pathos to convey their message?
Women customarily center their choices and judgments off of emotion (pathos), not logic
(logos). When women are persistently doubting their appearance, their emotions are
adversely affected. The #SpeakBeautiful campaign taps into this mutual psyche, through
classifying womens struggles from the millions of tweets.

The purpose of this campaign is to target the viewers emotional appeals through
numerous approaches to help change the way this generation as well as the future perceive
themselves. In order to achieve a clear message to the female audience and to specifically
focus on them, the brand has employed minimal color, pending down to its theme color,
blue and white. Doves use of blue lettering and text alludes to their theme color. However,
it can also be linked to the feeling of tranquility and calmness, and remind the audience that
this is what their products provides. The extensive use of white can embody the the truth
behind their product and their simple mission to help the female market feel more
confident and beautiful. This campaign abducts the audiences attention by exhibiting this
commercial in an unparalleled format. It opens up with the domino-effect of self-abusive
comments on Twitter, while ultimately affirming that it only takes one positive Tweet to
start a new trend. The application of a chain reaction manifests the idea of the cumulative
effect produced when one image-shaming tweet is sent, setting of an entire chain of parallel
events. In order to draw focus on inner beauty, the commercial doesnt include any female
figures. This is to reinforce the idea that beauty comes from within. The language of the text

is specifically chosen to communicate on effect on the reader in this case to both inform
and persuade. Towards the ending of the commercial, Dove has chosen to display the
words, Lets change the way we talk about beauty on social media. The advert allures to
the mournful emotions of the audience by using the word we, creating a personal
connection with the audience. The simplicity and straightforwardness of the words links to
its purpose of informing. Noticeable is the use of short sentences entailing a
straightforward message to their audience. The frequent utilization of full stop indicates an
imperative tone, and the strong-willingness of the brand to commit to its purpose of
correcting the false perception of beauty in todays society. Directly following the
demonstrative campaign, Dove pivots and places its logo, alongside twitters, and the newly
spawned slogan A partnership for social change. This strategic placement alludes the
consolidation of Dove and Twitter to create a platform where negative comments no longer
subsist, as well as causing the audience to subjectively associate Dove as the means to
achieving their perpetual craving for beauty.

This advertisement is a strategic model of Dove prevailing on social media without using
their product to appeal to their target market. Thus, their core task is to help women stop
following the conventional misconception of beauty, and to stop abusing and self-abusing
through social media. Even though its behind doors, its still as much hurtful. Even though
this is what they aim to do, it is important to note and analyze how this advertisement is to
get women to buy their products. They want women to embrace their inner beauty by
buying their products. Creating this advert achieved a paramount status, initiating a
platform associated with Twitter to broaden the definition of beauty. With how women

perceive themselves and others with a negative outlook, this poses restrictions on the
definition of beauty and consequently the combination of both these companies will help
eliminate or minimize this setback in todays world.

Works Cited

Dove #SpeakBeautiful | Let's make social media a more positive place. Video. Youtube.
Feb 19, 2015. Jan 20, 2015.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cncxoJPwBw>