Only 4% of women believe they’re beautiful. The biggest barrier to women feeling beautiful is their own self-perception. Women are their own worst critics. To move the other 96% to believe in themselves, we needed to prove that they are wrong about their own self-image and reveal their real beauty.

Our strategy was to conduct a project that would reveal to women how they saw themselves and thus ignite a global conversation around women’s self-perception. The experiment sought to provoke women, and the world around them, to discuss, rethink and hopefully discover real beauty.

The Dove Movement for self-esteem invites all women to join in creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety. To meet this ambition, Dove tackled the biggest barrier to women feeling beautiful: their own self-perception.

While most womens’ communications impose an image for women to follow, our experiment did the opposite. It asked women to confront their own self-image. It proved to women that they were wrong about their self-perception. It inspired women to recognize their real beauty.

We created a social experiment: Real Beauty Sketches. We invited an FBI-trained sketch artist to draw a woman’s portrait according to her own self-description. We then asked him to sketch a portrait of the same woman according to a stranger’s description of her. Throughout the portraits the artist never laid eyes on the women themselves.

To close, we held an exhibition comparing the portraits. Women admitted that portraits based on the strangers’ descriptions were more beautiful, happier and accurate than the portraits based on their own description. We revealed to the world that women are more beautiful than they think.

With only 10 days:

• 3 Billion media impressions generated (all original stories)

• The Today show, Good Morning America, NBC news

• New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes.com, The Telegraph, Huffington Post, The Independent.

People didn’t just follow it, we provoked people to get involved:

• The most shared article in the history of mashable.com

• Responsible for more than 90% of the video content shares.

All of which took the brand’s relationship with people to new heights:

- 14,368% increase in daily rate of tweets about the brand

- 4.3 million clicks through to the Dove site