Cannes Lion Silver in Media, Effie Awards Silver in Media, Shorty Award Bronze for Best Use of Twitter & Best Use of Hashtag, AdWeek Best Use of Social
For the past 10 years, Dove has been committed to making beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety–but over the course of those years, the beauty landscape has changed drastically.
Now, ideas and opinions about beauty are shared every second through social media feeds—we are, effectively, crowdsourcing a new definition of beauty—but women don't fully realize the power of their posts.
In 2014 alone, women posted 5 million negative Tweets about beauty and body image. Women are two times as likely to say something negative about themselves on Twitter as they are to say something positive about themselves on Twitter.
In a world connected by social media, women casually compose Tweets that can be hurtful, damaging, or critical -- to themselves, to others, and to society. These negative conversations--coming from friends, family, celebrities, and advertisers--fill feeds and minds with self-doubt, serving to hinder women on their journeys to beauty confidence.
In 2015, Dove and Twitter set out on a mission to transform that reality, inspire behavioral change, and ignite a cultural shift in the beauty conversation on social media by encouraging women everywhere to #SpeakBeautiful.
RESULTS
The results exceeded expectations -- most importantly, we stimulated a behavioral change on a mass scale through #SpeakBeautiful.
In 2014, there were over 5.3 million negative Tweets about beauty or body image sent by women. In 2015, that number dropped to 3.4 million – a 36.8% decrease year over year.
We also impacted change during key event activations, with Twitter reporting real changes in conversation around the Oscars and VMAs. From Oscars 2014 to 2015, women posted 30% fewer negative Tweets and 69% more positive Tweets about themselves. Similarly, beauty conversation around the VMAs was 76% positive, up 14 points from 2014. #SpeakBeautiful also swept Twitter as a U.S. trending topic during both nights.
Throughout the course of the year, women were inspired by our message, using #SpeakBeautiful more than 168,000 times and driving 800 million social media impressions of the campaign.
Through community management, we were able to connect with women on a personal level and engage 1:1 with over 3,000 negative Tweets, with more than 1,000 on Oscars night alone. Of those who responded to this personal encouragement, we shifted sentiment on 85% of conversations.
In addition to changing how people talked about beauty, we changed how people thought of the Dove brand. According to Twitter, the #SpeakBeautiful campaign drove affinity for the brand, with brand sentiment increasing 17 percent.
With #SpeakBeautiful, Dove and women everywhere are making social media a more positive place.