• Potential for industry impact

Emojis have quickly emerged as a social and emotional language but we noticed a telling fact: All emojis had straight hair.

We realized with emojis becoming an everyday growing language, there are ones representing girls, boys, blonde-haired, dark-haired, brunettes, all skin colours, grandpa and grandma, straight couples, gay couples, babies, policemen, all kinds of animals and plants, and even a smiley poo... but there was no one single emoji with curls. In an already universal system of representation, curly-haired women didn't have a place.

We developed the first ever Curly Emojis keyboard.

5 different kinds of curls, 5 different kinds of skin and hair colour, a full range of expressions. We designed 209 emojis to finally represent all women; along with stickers and 55 different gifs for them to express themselves as they should always do, freely.

• Implementation: Launched in United States on Google Play and AppStore for free

• Timeline: from 04/11/2015 to present

• Placement: AppStore and Google Play

Scale: Initially done for United States but the app is available worldwide

• Business impact

14% sales increase between launch in November and December 2015

278% increase in purchase intent. (Snaps Wrap Draft 28/01/16)

• Response rate

99% Positive tonality across all coverage: 114 BROADCAST placements for 3.6MM+ broadcast impressions in US. (Edelman, IAT Recap 12/02/2015)

• Change in behaviour

Nearly 8 in 10 women with curly hair say the existing women or girl emojis underrepresent their hair type (Edelman Berland study, October 2015).

Through the launch of the curly emojis keyboard, Dove raised the issue of a straight haired model of beauty, generating 1.06 billion impressions to date (Edelman, IAT Recap 12/02/2015) and leading curly haired women and girls to share their love for curls, with 894K downloads and sticker installs (Edelman, last result in January) and 2.76M Peer2Peer shares of curly emojis (Snaps Wrap Draft 28/01/16)

Adding a simple missing emoji allowed the brand to connect directly with curly haired women and girls. This initiative got the brand closer with this community, driving it to be recognized as one of them. It also gave curly-haired women an immediate means to share their love for curls and to connect with each other in a rewarding way.

By creating the first ever curly emojis, the brand truly democratized this universal language and connected directly to all curly haired women (no matter what their age or their ethnic origin) enabling them to finally express themselves in a language that is just as beautiful as they are.

Adding a simple missing emoji allowed the brand to connect with curly haired women and girls in several ways:

It suddenly brought to the light the glaring fact that curls were underrepresented in emojis, challenging the “straight hair” norm.

It gave curly haired women an immediate means to share their love for curls

It enhanced their self-confidence and self-esteem.

It enabled the target to connect with each other in a rewarding way, allowing the brand not only to get closer with this community but also to be recognized as one of them.

Today in the US, research shows that only 1 out of 10 curly haired women is proud of her curls.

This is notably due to traditional standards of beauty that perpetuate a model of beauty as straight-haired. This leads to issues of self-confidence, affecting women even further when they are faced with misrepresentations of themselves in media and pop culture.

Dove as a brand stands for an authentic, open and democratic vision of beauty and is on a mission to challenge the norms at the roots of women’s beauty anxieties.

More than just pointing out this fact, the brand wanted to DO something that would empower curly haired women to feel proud of their curls and share the love.

This campaign had two objectives:

? Renew and enrich the historical brand purpose of building women's self-esteem;

? Continue to support the range dedicated to curly hair as the reference on the market.