Dove Hair faced difficulty penetrating the US market as consumers perceive Dove to be a personal care brand, specializing in body care rather than hair care. In 2015, Dove Hair planned to introduce a new range of curly hair products and needed to turn the category performance around. For the first time, we devised a campaign that would leverage the overarching Dove brand voice and communicate emotionally with our consumers versus functionally.

We found curls to be an emotionally and culturally charged topic, tightly connected to self-esteem – the core pillar of the Dove brand equity and social mission – an important issue which crosses curl type, texture and cultural background. We found that women with curly hair had fragmented feelings that often skewed negatively. Dove’s history and heritage in self-esteem left us poised to intercept that negative conversation and motivate a positive one among media and consumers alike.

We conducted research in support of our hypotheses and brought the findings to life in a digital film that took girls on a journey from hating their curly hair to celebrating and embracing it through the power of a song. The film closed with a CTA for all women to show their curl-love in order to inspire future generations to do the same. We aimed to create a celebration of curls by leveraging the unique voice of the Dove brand, prompting millions of women to show the world how they love their hair, in favor of our mission and hashtaging #LoveYourCurls

The goal was to generate awareness for Dove Hair by shedding light on a social issue related to beauty and self-esteem that would ignite a national dialogue and connect on a deeper emotional level with our audience. In doing so, we aimed to establish brand love for the hair category through powerful insights and engaging content.

-The campaign resulted in more than 1.6 billion media impressions, 95% positive sentiment in overall coverage.

-It was the fastest starting Dove film reaching the #2 position on the Ad Age Viral Video Chart during its first week.

-#LoveYourCurls trended nationally on Twitter

-The film reach upwards of 27MM video views.

- 450 million social impressions

- And over 7,000 UGC engagements.

-Dove Hair’s curl range was 55% higher than originally forecasted at retail. It is on track to be Dove Hair’s most successful launch to date.

-The campaign has lead to an overall Dove Hair sales increase of +9% vs. YAG since the campaign launch.

- And it has inspired a social tipping point, motivating millions of women and girls to love their curls.

Dove Hair launched Love Your Curls via integrated programming on NBC’s TODAY Show, which unleashed a PR blitz across general market and multicultural media. The programming illustrated the campaign mission by airing the song film clip, opening a dialogue with women from the film, establishing contextual relevance via TODAY’s own social experiment and delivering a consumer CTA.

We partnered with bilingual lifestyle experts, as well as natural hair bloggers/vloggers to build loyalty among niche communities and drive targeted awareness for the campaign’s emotional layers. We continued momentum by capitalizing on culturally relevant tentpoles, including a curl-inspired media event on the eve of music’s biggest award show to celebrate curls on the red carpet. We prioritized scale outreach to digital media and influencers to create online sharing and conversation, and also planned for agility by engaging any media, influencers or consumers talking about curls, by asserting our CTA via traditional and social tactics.

For the product launch we intended to reach curly-haired women – inclusive of all hair textures and ethnicities. Through research and social listening we discovered that women struggle with their curls at some stage in their life and that traditional standards of beauty, in this case straight and sleek hair, can perpetuate issues of self-confidence among women and girls who struggle to feel beautiful with curly hair. We had a unique opportunity to leverage the power of Dove’s social mission to connect emotionally with curly-haired women and inspire them to become role models for future generations.

We conducted research to support our overarching hypotheses and better understand the dynamic relationship women have with their curls. We found that only 10% of women report feeling proud of their curly hair and even more alarming, only 4 out of 10 little girls with curly hair think their hair is beautiful. However, we also found that girls with curly hair are more likely to feel beautiful and feel proud of their curls if people around them do. We realized that insight was the key to unlocking a social movement. We aimed to target all curly-haired women to instigate a national conversation that peeled back the emotional layers of this topic and connected with them on social and cultural levels. We strategically targeted niche curl communities, multi-cultural consumers, as well as the general market to set the conversation in motion.