Only 4% of women believe they’re beautiful. How to inspire the other 96% to feel the same?

A decade after Campaign for Real Beauty started Dove wanted to modernize its mission. In a radical strategic shift, Dove evolved the social debate beyond beauty stereotypes to address the new enemy to feeling beautiful – a women’s inner beauty critic. The goal was to re-engage women, re-ignite the masterbrand halo, and ultimately to drive value sales by reinforcing Dove’s emotional relevance in women’s lives.

Our idea was to show women they were more beautiful than they think. We used a FBI trained sketch artist to draw women according to their own self-description, and then according to a stranger’s description of her. The results were startling. In every case, the stranger’s portrait was more beautiful and true than her self-description. The experiment was captured in a 6 minute online film, and the side by side portraits were exhibited as a print and outdoor.

While most women’s communications imposes an image for women to follow, our experiment did the opposite. It asked women to confront their own self-image. It sought to provoke women, and the world around them, to discuss, rethink and hopefully discover their own real beauty. The experiment brought Dove’s Real Beauty conversation back to real women.

Following Dove Real Beauty Sketches there was a significant increase in Dove’s differentiation and advantage as the brand reclaimed ownership of its defining attributes.

By hitting a very intimate nerve in women, Dove Real Beauty Sketches ignited the female grapevine, restored Dove to the heart of culture, and became the most watched online film ever.

Fundamentally, this renewed brand meaning ignited the masterbrand halo, sparking value growth in Dove’s biggest categories in all four markets; significantly outstripping category value growth in every instance.

But perhaps the greatest achievement of Dove Real Beauty Sketches is with women themselves: Sisters spoke to sisters, strangers spoke to strangers, and real beauty became a cultural conversation that helped women to realize that they’re more beautiful than they think.