Let’s pretend that you head an organization that fights women’s stereotypes and you apply to various companies who market to women for funding to develop campaigns on beauty and age or beauty and skin color. How responsive (read: generous) do you think companies would be in funding those efforts?

Now let’s say that you’re the head of marketing in what’s essentially a commodity market. You’re not a top rated brand, so you want to identify a nitch that, handled correctly, you could own—at least for a while.

So you look around and notice that, demographically speaking, the market composed of women over 50 is not only set for explosive growth, but it also has substantial income at its disposal. You know that it’s not only underserved, but that most of the products are marketed as a way to look younger, as opposed to celebrating being over 50. Hmm, so what do you do?

Blow away the competition by creating a Campaign for Real Beauty. According to Jupiter Research analyst Nate Elliott

Dove has accomplished something amazing: it’s taken ownership of the topic of women’s self-esteem, and somehow repositioned itself from being part of the beauty industry (which it irrefutably is) to being one of the beauty industry’s harshest critics — and in the process, they’ve sold millions of pounds of beauty products.

Visit the site and watch all four videos, look around, they have great value.

What happened next? The competition took notice and and looked for another powerful market to address and, hopefully, own and found it in African-American women. My Black is Beautiful is the campaign described in with a movement and it includes a minfestothe company is P&G

There’s a little-girl memory that Najoh Tita-Reid recounts, as a way of explaining what’s behind a new campaign by the nation’s biggest advertiser.

A young child in suburban Pittsburgh, she goes to play dolls with her neighbors, all of them white. Her doll stands out with its black color and features, and one girl says pointedly: “Najoh, our dolls can’t play with yours.”

Why not? “Because your doll is ugly,” comes the reply.

It may be 30 years since that comment, but attitudes haven’t changed all that much.

My Black is Beautiful is getting noticed—and generating controversy.

Personally, I was disappointed at first glance, because the women represented on My Black is Beautiful are celebrities and no way are they typical, whereas the Dove women seem to be more like “us.” There is a slightly surreal aspect at Dove in that the women are dominantly Caucasian, but on the other hand, Dove may have been smart to avoid that controversy.

Both companies took major risks and spent big bucks on the campaigns and they certainly deserve credit for leading the way into the minefields surrounding these topics. Sure, they have a commercial goal, but that doesn’t dull the importance of the topics or the dialogs they’re enabling. Not long ago I wrote about the motivational value of VSI (vested self-interest) as applies to individuals—obviously it applies to companies as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 7:35 am and is filed under About Leadership, Communication, Culture, management, What Leaders DO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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