Between 2006 and 2010, the Dove Ultimate Beauty Care range saw a significant decline in North America - a top region for the Dove brand - forcing the team to rewind, reflect, rethink and refresh the way we communicated with women. We decided to listen to consumers and hear about the beauty concerns they were facing. We discovered 50% of women weren’t comfortable wearing sleeveless fashions and 100% of women find underarms unattractive. Armed with these insights, we decided to launch a new, refreshed premium line rooted in providing beautiful, revealable underarms in 5 days. We also gave the collection a new name, Dove Go Sleeveless, inviting women to say 'goodbye to sleeves' and 'hello to beautiful underarms'. Perhaps the most compelling part of the campaign was the organic PR coverage that flourished after launch. There was a deafening buzz behind go sleeveless that was a natural result of the campaign’s relevance, rooted in instilling confidence back in women and providing consumers with a clear call to action through social media channels. We confronted an issue not commonly discussed head-on and are proud that women everywhere took pride in revealing beautiful skin using Dove Go Sleeveless Deodorant.

The Go Sleeveless campaign was delivered in 3 easy steps: Create Conversation; involve women in the transformation; and celebrate. PR had a primary role in Step 1, leading and encouraging conversations around the fact that clothing choices can be affected by underarm appearance.

In August 2010 the Uncovering Underarms study was completed, generating key headlines to ignite conversations between the consumer, media channels and key opinion formers. On April 6th 2011, the PR campaign was launched, running according to plan for 3 consecutive months and climaxing with the ultimate prize of a shopping trip with Jessica Szohr in NYC. Blanketing fashion, entertainment and beauty medial channels, PR had a strong share of voice, driving compelling stories on broadcast, bloggers, online media placements, social arenas, newspapers and magazines. Online WOM helped create organic conversations on social networking sites, inviting other media channels to pay attention.

At SOP12, Go Sleeveless is exceeding expectations, exhibiting strong performance where distributed, and increasing value share by 0.35%. Pearl Finish has landed in the top half of Dove's Premium sticks in Wal*Mart, Target, Drug and Food (average 6 U/S/W). Notably, go sleeveless has showed continued growth without needing any additional promotions, restoring customer confidence in Dove's Premium skin care propositions (vs. go fresh), aiding go sleevesless innovation support in 2012.Ad performance is also significantly higher than previous campaigns, indexing at over 100 in many of the performance measures, including 'likeability' and 'brand recall'.PR was a key driver in implementing this, garnering strong impressions across mainstream, trade and fashion media channels. Dove aimed to make big impressions, underestimating the strong consumer insights revealed from the study and how they would leverage compelling, and often organic, conversations. Supporting the re-launch, PR helped create over 318m impressions in North America.