Dove: Love Your Curls, 1

Credits & Description:

BRAND: Dove
BRAND OWNER: Unilever
CATEGORY: Toiletries/Cosmetics
REGION: United States
DATE: February - December 2015
AGENCY: Mindshare
MEDIA CHANNEL: Mobile,Online,TV
Insight
Dove Hair launched in 2003 with a preceding awareness of 25%, due to misattribution from the brand’s personal wash counterparts. Disappointingly, after 10 years of advertising, Dove Hair ended 2014 with the exact same 25% awareness, and significant share decline. In 2015, it was mission critical for Dove Hair to differentiate from Dove Body in order to foster sustainable growth in the hair category.
Launching Quench Absolute, a new product specifically designed to nourish curly hair, was a key opportunity to finally break through and reinvigorate the brand.
60% of females in the US have curly hair, and these women spend 50% more on conditioners and styling products than straight-haired women. While this population is massive, curly hair tends to be underrepresented in culture for women. Even from a very young age, curly hair is presented as the exception vs. the rule. Despite this, it had witnessed an upward trend in women embracing their “natural” hair and celebrating their curls.
This cultural trend poised the brand well to talk about curls, releasing a product line encouraging her to rediscover the curls she was BORN with, for perfectly nourished hair and beautiful defined natural curls.
In order to connect with its target as the brand for her, Mindshare needed to advocate for, and show a deep understanding of her curly hair. To crack this would open up a huge opportunity for brand growth.
Strategy
In order to successfully launch a product for curls and build brand equity, Dove Hair needed to understand and connect with curly-haired women.
In the US, the agency found that curls were both an emotionally and culturally charged topic for women, and this relationship was tremendously evident in social media conversation. Social listening concluded that the majority of this conversation was extremely adverse, with over one hundred million disparaging remarks on Twitter in 2014.

But where is this negativity stemming from? Dove set out to find this answer.
The agency facilitated research which uncovered that media, society, and those around them, greatly influence how a woman feels about her curly hair. With nearly 9 in 10 of women with curly hair saying idolised women in pop culture are typically portrayed as having straight, smooth hair, it is not a surprise that this leads to a common dissatisfaction with curly hair. This negativity then becomes ingrained at a young age. Shockingly, only four out of 10 girls with curly hair think their hair is beautiful!
The silver lining? These girls are 7x more likely to love their curls if the curly women in their lives love their own.
With these insights, Dove sought out to change the existing negative curl conversation into a positive one, in order to change the way women perceive their own curly hair, and in doing so pave the way for how future generations see theirs.
The key was to drive this in social, where most of the negative conversation was bubbling up, by creating breakthrough content to bring the issue to light and start the conversation. Creating a platform where women could speak out, and ultimately inspire change.
Execution
The mission was to inspire women to love their curls, and in return inspire future generations to love theirs. #LoveYourCurls was created as the platform for social change and everything Mindshare did linked back to this.
Over 10 months the agency launched a film, a children’s e-book, and an emoji supporting this mission; and while these sound unconventional to support a hair brand, all served a strategic purpose in driving the #LoveYourCurls social conversation.
• Launch film to start the conversation: The short film was released and syndicated, as storytelling was critical for women to understand the tension and their impact. The film featured six girls who had gone through a transformative relationship with their curly hair from hate to love, influenced by women around them. The agency made the insights newsworthy, featuring these girls’ stories on NBC’s TODAY Show, with three days of coverage. The social conversation was ignited!
• Children’s e-book to inspire all generations: With the groundswell of shared curl stories from real women, Mindshare partnered with a best-selling children’s author to turn these into an e-book. The stories made curly hair the hero, and were meant to inspire the girls being read to. It promoted this in social and through e-book channels.
• Emoji to naturally fuel existing social conversation: With the social conversation growing, the agency recognised a common method of social communication, emojis, still did not represent curls. It then created the first ever curly-hair emoji keyboard and partnered with Twitter to create a custom #LoveYourCurls emoji. Mindshare drove awareness of this programme through tactical mobile and high-impact custom print cover units and TV integrations.
Results
The product supported by this campaign, Quench Absolute, is on track to be one of Dove Hair’s most successful US launches to date –exceeding forecast by 50%.
More importantly, after nine years of continuous decline, and amidst questions about the long term viability of the brand, the LYC campaign has driven a dramatic turnaround of the US Dove Hair business:
• +700bps unaided awareness (Millward Brown 2015 report)
• Dove Hair grew 10% since the campaign launch– not only turning around a decline, but growing the business.
The most compelling learning from the campaign is the incredible impact that can be made (for a brand and society) when championing a bold POV and authentically engaging women on a topic that really matters to them. It not only drove awareness and sales (the key objective), but also reduced the amount of negative curl social conversation in social by 20%!
This is the repeatable model for Dove Hair in the US, and how the brand will drive long term sustainable growth.