Manchester City Football Club: Helping kids dream big - ?

Repositioning an iconic brand away from a harmful industry towards a bold, inclusive vision.

Project:

SVA Masters in Branding 2024 Thesis: “Engendering”

Role:

Strategist, Creative Direction, Research, Project Management

Team:

Natalie Marques, Gloria Biggers, Sarah Fassberg

Advisors:

Dr. Dan Formosa, Natalia Formosa, Shrutika Manivannan

Context
The SVA Masters in Branding thesis project requires candidates to analyze, evaluate, and reposition brands that have fallen out of step with culture or have a great opportunity to make a leap forward. The focus of the 2024 thesis was “Engendering:” an investigation into typically gendered brands and arenas and how they are currently reflecting — or failing to reflect — gender. Our challenge was to question these existing legacy systems to unearth opportunities that can solve brand, societal, community and personal challenges. The criteria included how to reposition these brands, develop strategies for greater relevance, and create new tactics in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

The Challenge
Since introducing the iconic “beauty bar” in 1957, the Dove brand has become synonymous with helping women look and feel more beautiful. In response to a 2004 global study that found that only 2% of women consider themselves beautiful, the brand introduced the iconic Campaign for Real Beauty, with the goal of transforming physical appearance from a source of anxiety to a source of confidence by expanding the definition of “real beauty.”

Yet despite this award-winning, revolutionary campaign, the brand’s own 2024 Real State of Beauty Report revealed that the beauty industry continues to be a source of anxiety and trauma, particularly for those who are in minority groups. Faced with this reality, we must question whether physical beauty can ever truly become a reliable source of confidence. And if not, how might Dove inspire confidence without relying on beauty?

The Opportunity

As defined by Naomi Wolf it in her 1990 bestseller “The Beauty Myth,” the relentless pursuit of beauty is “an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred." The beauty industry, in turn, has both propagated and profited from equating beauty with confidence: you are either beautiful, or not beautiful. Confident, or not confident.

Dove has an opportunity to liberate not only women but members of all genders from these harmful binaries imposed by the beauty industrial complex by moving from a brand that builds self-esteem for women through beauty to a brand that inspires body confidence for all bodies.

The Solution

Dove must undergo a strategic repositioning that reflects this new commitment to building confidence that is not contingent upon physical beauty. In order to inspire body confidence in all bodies, Dove will make a bold declaration and exit the beauty industry. This will include stripping the word “beauty” from all products and messaging, and reintroducing the Campaign for Real Beauty as the Campaign for All Bodies. Dove will now promote self-acceptance through the idea of embodiment, the experience of living and being in the body, and having the choice to consciously inhabit the full spectrum of being a human.

Our Manifesto

Finally, our “What do you embody?” campaign will showcase Dove’s commitment to something deeper than beauty. Because the embodiment of every body shouldn't be limited to one side of a binary. Dove believes you can embody everything you are. And as you are, you are enough.