http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
Our identity’s are not really our own, we are given a list of features and choices as children through cartoons, books, TV shows, the radio and more. Society views things through lenses that color what we see. Due to this we are really just product of the media.
Dove has recently counteracted the norms of society by introducing the Evolution of Beauty Campaign. The ad I have chosen to depict starts with a ‘normal’ however, not necessarily pretty (as defined by our society) woman who comes in for a photo shoot. She is placed under professional make up artists, as the video speeds through what is a considerable amount of time; anywhere from an hour to 2 hours. After the transformation is over, the photos, which have been taken by professionals, are fine picked and photo shopped by an expert. At the end it shows the same photo plastered on a billboard, with a picture of a woman, who in no way, looks anything like the lady at the beginning of the video.
This commercial has clearly gone against the norm of society by showing the extent and unrealistic lengths companies’ use as their marketing strategies, however, by doing so dove has created a new strategy that exposes the other companies and attracts more attention to them selves by being apart from the norms. Dove has been using these techniques in their commercials to attract to the reality of beauty rather than this fake beauty portrayed in the picture, no one in real life looks like the girl in the picture… not even the girl herself. Our culture and our values today have led us to believe we are supposed to look like this when in reality, it is unrealistic. That has been the strategy by marketers in order to get the consumers to buy all of their fancy expensive makeups and products.
“Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty “fixes” that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.”(Naomi Wolf, The beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women pp 269) Because of society’s perplexed ideology of what a woman is supposed to look like, we, both men and woman, have lost our sense of self-identity and we have become depicted duplicates of society’s forced images. This isn’t a new issue being brought up either, for decades young men and women have been immersed in such stereotypes that it has become a part of our culture. Naomi Wolf talks about the importance of inner beauty, in lieu of how we appear to the public, and that is exactly the message that Dove has put in place for us today.
To conclude, the ad created by Dove is very successful not only because it has gone against societal norms but also because it has done a great job at exposing the media for what it really is, a lying scam in which it guilt’s and forces people to feel the need to buy unnecessary product in order to feel like everyone else. This is similar to the point made in Media and Society; “if they do not they will not find themselves reflected in these stories. And children whose families are different from this normal, ideal family may perceive themselves as different, as not fitting within the norm.” (Michael O’Shaughnessy, Media and Society pp 181) This concept not only applies with children and their families, but also teenagers and young adults in everyday life.
tykeca 