Those FHM honeys in their Agent Provocateur scanties must be quaking in
their thigh-high boots. Right now, it is girls in white cotton underwear who
are getting the nation's knickers in a twist. The new Dove advertising campaign
for a range of firming products, featuring "normal" women in their
underwear, has achieved that rare thing for an ad campaign: water-cooler chat
status. The six women featured have become minor celebrities, and in the first
month after the campaign was launched, sales of the range have doubled. The
female marketing team behind the ad have been so inspired by their campaign's
success that they have struck a pose themselves, modelling for a similar ad on
a billboard outside their offices.
So "What, you mean the fat girls?" is not the response I am
expecting when I canvass opinion. Anyone who assumed that the female public
would be overwhelmed with gratitude at a campaign that puts a reality check on
our ever more airbrushed ideals of beauty can think again. The real story is
much more complicated. Decades of being fed a strict diet of size eight-only
models might have left us hungry for images of "normal" women, but
they have also left us with fractured and conflicting views about beauty and
body image - so much so that we can't actually agree on whether the Dove women
are too thin or too big. While some women feel that the pictures are
"still unrealistic - some of them look like real models" or that
"they'd all look good in a bikini", others thought they were "unattractive"
or admitted that they liked the pictures because they made them, by contrast,
feel thin. Joanna Cook, one of the women who appears in the ad, has had many
women tell her they love the picture, but heard others refer to it as "the
fat campaign".
What everyone agrees on is that the ads are unignorable. Now that
"perfect" female bodies wallpaper our streets and crowd our newsagent
shelves, it is pallor and a slight paunch that has the power to stop traffic.
What's more, personality and humour seem to have been airbrushed out of most
beauty adverts along with any stray fat cells. Linda di Maria, another of the
Dove Six, contrasts "their" picture with "those adverts with
thin girls in exotic locations with bits of silk draped everywhere" - an
accurate picture of the po-faced Milk Tray time warp in which most beauty
advertising is stuck.
Christine Walker, founder partner of Walker Media, is hugely impressed by
the campaign. "I love it. It's a stunning campaign: simple, full of
humour, vibrancy and earthiness. And it's fun, which is very unusual for a
beauty brand."
At first sight it looks as if Dove, in giving women what they say they want
- 57% of women would prefer to see larger women in adverts - are on to a
surefire winner. But, at the risk of sounding horribly anti-feminist, you can't
always believe what women say they want. Consumer research shows that women
will usually say that they would like to see bigger models in advertising, but
when shown ads with different models, women are more likely to want to buy the
product advertised by the "perfect" woman. Not long ago, M&S
launched a campaign featuring an average-sized woman declaring, "I'm
normal!" which, despite widespread media coverage, failed to generate
sales. Christine Walker draws a parallel with the Proms: if you ask how many
people watch the Proms on TV, you get a figure that is far higher than the
actual viewing figures for the Proms. People aren't exactly lying, but they may
well be kidding themselves.
Almost everyone agrees that, unlike most beauty adverts, the Dove ad sends
out positive messages. "Anything that contests the near-monopoly that
anorexia has on young women's ideas about ideal body shapes is to be warmly
welcomed" was one comment. In an attempt to understand the thinking behind
the campaign, I asked one of the marketing team whether she thought it was a
feminist campaign. "Oh, goodness!" she exclaimed, as if I had asked
her something embarrassing. "I wouldn't like to say!"
Similarly, when I suggest that there is a certain irony in professional women
who are backing a campaign designed to say that size doesn't matter posing in
their knickers - and having their weight, dress size and marital status
catalogued in the Daily Mail - the idea is stonewalled. Both the original
advert, and the team photo, have deliberately been made as unsexual as possible
- sensible underwear, daylight background, smiles rather than pouts - but they
are both, when push comes to shove, using scantily clad women to sell beauty
products.
To consumers increasingly frustrated with ever more unrealistic airbrushing,
the Dove campaign - both the advert and the picture of the marketing team -
packs a punch with its straightforward, real, no-tricks approach. (Dove insists
that no computer wizardry has been used on the pictures.) The psychology behind
this method of selling a firming product, however, is far more complicated than
traditional beauty advertising. For years, the formula was the same: show a
picture of a lotion being poured on to a pair of wondrously thin thighs and the
consumer will buy the lotion, when what she really wants, of course, is the
thighs. With these ads, however, the process is a little hazier. These adverts
appear to be telling women that its OK to be the size they are - to hold up a
mirror to them, rather than a matchstick lady - which does not explain how the
firming cream gets sold.
In the murky world of expensively packaged promises, "firming" is
one of those positive but helpfully vague words adored by the beauty industry.
Just as face creams are sold as "smoothing", which suggests
anti-wrinkle properties without actually making any specific claim, so lotions
for "problem areas" are sold as "firming". If you read the
small print, firming products usually make it clear that they claim to change
nothing but skin texture. But many wishful-thinking women confuse the issue of
having firm skin on their thighs with having firm, rather than wobbly, thighs -
a transformation that might be accomplished in the gym or the swimming pool,
but will never (sadly) take place in the bathroom.
While some of the Dove women may be plump, they all look free of cellulite.
So although only one product in the range specifically claims to tackle
cellulite, the subtle message of the ad is that with the right cream, no one,
of any size, need have cellulite - an enticing promise for many. But the real
appeal of the advert seems to lie not in the women's bodies at all, but in
their faces. In my (admittedly unscientific) study, those women who said that
the adverts made them want to buy the product most often said that this was
because they liked the happy faces and confident attitude, not the thighs or
tummies. ("It makes me feel cheerful, which makes me feel good about the
brand" was a typical response.) One of the marketing team said that what
the range could do for you was not so much in terms of physical appearance, but
in terms of making you feel "a little happier every day". An
audacious claim, but one which, to judge by the campaign's early sales success,
seems to be bringing in the punters: we may have wised up to the fact that you
can't get thin thighs in a bottle, but it seems we're still suckers for instant
happiness.
