The story of True Beauty

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Most stories are not just stand-alone narratives, but they take place in a larger narrative or even universe. Edmond implicitly refers to that by explaining the trend of parodies and imitations of video clips on YouTube.[1] They do not stand alone, but refer to the ‘original’ music video clip that they parody. While it might not be new that stories refer to other stories, nowadays they are told through various media: transmedia storytelling. Johnson gives the example of Marvel, which has created one extremely large universe out of different stories that are portrayed in both comics and movies.[2] Characters of all these stories sometimes even meet, for example in The Avengers.[3] Smith gives the interesting example of  Lego Bionicle, a story that is spread over toys, videos, games etc.[4] In this article about Lego, Smith focusses on the concepts of spreadability and drillability, which are helpful in studying transmedia storytelling in general. He says that a spreadable story motivates the “audience to produce and share divergent stories outside the official canon and circulate them to a wide audience”,[5] causing the story to get spread over different (social) media. A drillable story on the other hand encourages users “to dig into and contribute to a complex story world”.[6] In this blog we investigate whether these concepts of transmedia storytelling, spreadability and drillability, work for brands and their campaigns as well. In order to do so, we focus on the example of Dove.

Dove is a personal care brand and develops and sells cosmetic products as deodorants, hair and facial care, body washes and moisturizer. Dove’s mission is to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence instead of anxiety.[7] They want to encourage women to think positive about how they look and their aim is to raise the self-esteem of women. Dove is spreading their thoughts not only through their personal care products but also via marketing campaigns on various media platforms. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a marketing campaign founded in 2004.[8] This campaign includes not only advertisements in magazines and on television but also workshops, events, books, theatre plays, videos, a Facebook page, the Twitter hashtag #DovePostiveChange, and The Dove Self-Esteem education project.  The book The Dove Report: Challenging Beauty states that Dove wants to “create a new definition of beauty [which] will free women from self-doubt and encourage them to embrace their real beauty.”[9] This preconceived and the designed story of Dove is the message that differs the brand from another beauty product brand in the same field. Dove offers a brand with extra moisturizer and uses it as a unique selling point (USP) for the customers. The ‘scripted’ part of the experience discourse is the graphics that represents the brand and is applied in many variants with different container for different products.

With this story Dove has become successful in building the consumer’s trust. Their strategy includes the application throughout several different media, making Dove, not just offering a series of beauty products. Accepting the fact that Dove does thus ‘spreads’ the story of real beauty over all kinds of different media, Smith nevertheless states that spreadability takes place in the “periphery, in the unintended area of play” because according to Jenkins spreadability motivates  “communities to circulate content according to their own interpretations, uses, and social relations.”[10] There are male-parodies referring to the Real Beauty campaign, which is normally always addressed to women. Thinking about spreadability, the question is whether Dove intentionally motivates people to give their own interpretation of the campaign and for example create these kinds of parodies.

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Drillability, on the other hand, is the potential to descend into the core and parse through its nuances.[11] So drillable media refers to a program (or a brand) that “encourage viewers to dig deeper probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling”.[12] Dove is trying to improve their drillability by creating more meanings attached to their brand. An example is The Dove Self-Esteem project, which is founded in 2004.[13] They have set up an educational program, for girls between ten and fourteen year, to help girls build their body confidence[14], which contains lesson plans, assignments and games available for teachers. There are also tips and tricks available for the parents, as ‘how to boost your daughters self-esteem?’, ‘What if she is being bullied about how she looks?’.[15] Dove also links this educational project to their products by saying that each time you buy a product it helps them to develop the project. They already reached more than eleven million girls with this project. So through this project there is a different site of the story visible, and it gives people the chance to get new information about the story. In this way you can dig deeper into the story according to Jason Mitchell.[16] With the Dove Self-Esteem project Dove is trying to tell a story with its product that can connect to many of their consumers. Instead of selling the “beauty” with famous public figures, Dove is creating a campaign to promote self-love using images of many women with different body types, skin colour, hair types and styles, etc.

By showing their narrative about real beauty, so that they can improve the confidence of many women, not only in a commercials but also in a theatre play, a book and through various workshops, Dove uses the idea of transmedia storytelling to attain their goal. When attending a workshop or taking part in the educational programme of Dove, your ideas and visions of the story of Dove will change. You will get a deeper understanding of the goals and ideas of this company then when you just buy a shower gel and read the text on the package. So Dove definitely works with the concept of drillability, by using different media to give a deeper understanding of their goals and meaning. Whether Dove also incorporates the concept of spreadability is questionable. This definitely would need more research. It is also logical that a brand would want to control their communication and the creation of their narrative or meaning. Taking this into account, it would be reasonable that commercial companies would not use the concept of spreadability.

References:

[1] Edmond, Maura. (2014). ‘Here we go again: Music videos after YouTube’, in: Television & New Media, 15, nr.4: 305-320.
[2] Johnson, Derek. (2012). ‘Cinematic destiny: Marvel studios and the trade stories of industrial convergence’, in: Cinema Journal, 52, nr.1: 1-24.
[3] Johnson (2012): 5,6.
[4] Smith, Aaron. (2011). Beyond Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age. Boston
[5] Smith (2011): 1,2.
[6] Smith (2011): 7.
[7]  Unilever (2014). ‘Our vision’, in: Dove. http://www.dove.co.uk/en/Our-Mission/Our-Vision/default.aspx (26-09-2014).
[8] Unilever (2014). ‘Our vision’, in: Dove. http://www.dove.co.uk/en/Our-Mission/Our-Vision/default.aspx (26-09-2014).
[9] Unilever. (2008). The Dove Report: Challenging Beauty http://www.dove.co.uk/en/Docs/PDF/DSEP-Workshop-guide_Youth-Leaders-FINAL.pdf  (26-09-2014).
[10] Smith, Aaron. (2011). Beyond Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age. Boston: 6/7.
[11] Smith (2011): 6.
[12] Smith (2011): 6.
[13] Unilever. (2014). ‘Dove Self-Esteem Project : Get Involved’, in: Dove http://www.dove.co.uk/en/Our-Mission/Dove-Self-Esteem-Project-Get-Involved/default.aspx (27-09-2014).
[14] Idem.
[15] Idem.
[16] Smith, Aaron. (2011). Beyond Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age. Boston: 5.

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