Reprinted with permission from Brunswick County Early College High School’s The Firebird Times.
Media Marketing is the use of strategies that initiate consumer interaction or interest through different media outlets. In recent years many companies have utilized media marketing through apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok to gain viewer attraction. Many advertisements are aimed to target a specific clique of people that the company feels resonate most with the product or idea they are presenting.
One example of a great use of media marketing is Dove’s #ShowUs campaign. This campaign was launched on March 27, 2019, and was designed ‘for women, by women’. This was a campaign targeted around combating the lack of inclusivity for women advertised in the media everywhere.
In a global survey conducted by Dove in 2019, approximately 70% of women said that they still do not feel represented in the images they see online every day. Many of the models we see modeling for bigger brands tend to lack diversity of race, ethnicity, and body type. Dove Global Vice President Sophie Galvani states, “Dove understands the impact that unrealistic images of beauty can have on a woman’s body confidence”.
In response to this phenomenon, Dove collaborated with Getty Images and Girlgaze to create a photo collection with over ten thousand pictures of women who don’t necessarily identify with the ‘Beauty Standard’ that society has come to accept as normal. This campaign was a huge success, causing many women to speak up regarding their disappointment in the beauty industry and bringing to light how many women have come to develop a corrupted sense of what defines beauty.
This campaign has been used to evoke change in the beauty industry today, as we can see with the growing diversity of models in brands such as Nike and Good American. Of course, there are still brands that stray away from proper diversity in their advertising; however, Dove’s campaign was a massive step in the right direction for gaining inclusivity for all women of different races, ethnicities, and body types.
