Call it anti-branding. Dove is engaging customers by taking aim at its own industry.
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A powerful short film is climbing the ranks on YouTube--with about 600,000 viewings in its first week in release. Just over a minute long, the film starts out with an image of a self-possessed young redhead, freckled and tomboy cute, staring into the camera as the chorus of the Simian song "La Breeze" builds: "here it comes, here it comes, here it comes." Then, BOOM! She's hit by a barrage of imagery: models in bikinis, glossy lips, curvy hips, bronzed buns, sleek thighs, giving way to a montage of magazine headlines and infomercials touting miracle potions, lotions, and fixes (including a disturbing sequence of images of plastic surgery and bulimia) for a smaller, tighter, thinner, better you. The tagline: "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does."

No, the film isn't a PSA created by some public interest group to caution women and girls against the evils of the beauty industry. It's a production of the beauty industry itself. Onslaught: a Dove film is the latest salvo in that brand's "Campaign for Real Beauty." Launched in September 2004, "Real Beauty" is a hybrid ad campaign/public awareness effort that has become a kind of case study for advertising to women, viral messaging, and new wave cause marketing all at once. By ditching aspiration (to supermodel splendor) for authenticity (the ubiquitous ads featured real women with real curves stripped down to their white skivvies), the campaign generated tremendous attention and serious sales.

Within the first six months of the campaign, the sales of the Dove firming lotions featured in the ads shot up by 700% in Europe and 600% in the United States. In addition to conventional advertisements, the campaign includes a series of viral films like Onslaught, education initiatives, and the Dove "Self-Esteem Fund," which pledges to reach some 5 million girls by 2010 with the aim of "free[ing] the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes."

Call it anti-branding. Dove is engaging customers by taking aim at its own industry. In other words, they're persuading people to buy it (their product) with a message against buying it (the hype, the marketing messages of an industry, consumerism itself).

If your first reaction is "evil genius," then you're not alone. Critics have knocked the campaign as, at best, cheap feminism, and, at worst, outright hypocrisy. Dove is a unit of global consumer products giant Unilever, which also sells Axe body spray with the help of a band of gyrating sex kittens called the "Bom Chicka Wah Wahs" (though it's hard to get too worked up about the campaign as it is an obvious parody of sex as advertising) and Slim-Fast weight loss products (more insidious as the line appeals to women's widespread dissatisfaction with their bodies and willingness to try almost anything to get slimmer, thinner, better). More damning still, Ogilvy, the agency responsible for the Real Beauty work, is also the U.S. agency of record for Barbie.

Of course, there's another way to look at this: in the context of an emerging conversation about consumption and values. The acceleration of globalization, the increasing alarm around climate change, and the constant flood of imagery from a chain of conflict zones around the world have put the high beams on the inherent tension between what we say we value (a just society, a healthy planet, a better quality of life for all) and how we behave everyday (guzzling water out of plastic bottles while our cars guzzle gas, buying stuff that might make us cooler, sexier, or smarter at the lowest prices possible while we generally distract ourselves from the bigger picture).

It's inevitable that marketers would insert themselves into this conversation--and not in an entirely cynical way. Consider, first, the genuine passion the people behind the Campaign for Real Beauty bring to their work of not just selling lotions and potions, but crafting and leading a conversation about girls and health and beauty that reaches millions. Going forward, the employers who fail to give their employees a real reason to believe will lose out to those who do. Second, the more companies make it their responsibility to tackle these issues and create positive change in the world, the more consumers will make it theirs. Of course, a lot of buying and selling of stuff will go on in the process.

Dove is not alone in its approach. Some of the most effective brands today are creating powerful, emotional bonds with customers on the basis of distinctly anti-commercial values. Take one of the consumption hot buttons of the year: plastic water bottles. Bottled water reached a tipping point sometime this summer when it morphed from a ubiquitous prop of the health- and status-conscious to a tainted luxury. The numbers astound: Americans alone consumed some 50 billion water bottles last year--and tossed about 38 million of those (recyclable) plastic water bottles into the trash. Meanwhile, 1 in 6 people around the world have no regular access to safe, dependable drinking water. What's more, much of that bottled water is actually of poorer quality than the stuff that flows freely out of the tap. (For a bracing and thorough exploration of the issues surrounding bottled water, be sure to check out our Fast Company pal Charles Fishman's fantastic article.)

Not surprisingly, a range of reusable water bottle manufacturers and water filter makers seized the opportunity, including Sigg, the hundred-year-old Swiss aluminum products company. In 1990, Sigg crafted its iconic seamless aluminum water bottle, which is now featured in MOMA's permanent collection. Ultra-durable, with a patented non-toxic internal coating, and 100% recyclable, the Sigg bottle sold steadily (if stealthily) until mid-2005 when the company launched a U.S. operation and repositioned itself as the environmentally responsible choice--the anti-water bottle water bottle. That move, along with the 100-plus customizable designs available at mysigg.com, set fire to Sigg's sales. U.S. sales doubled in 2006 (they were up 200% this summer alone) and are on track to triple this year. Values-based retailers, including Patagonia and Whole Foods, now feature Sigg as the water bottle of choice for conscious consumers.

Now, the point of these success stories is not to make a case for the "un" brand as the new "it" brand. Rather, it is to suggest that the organizations that put a stake in the ground--by articulating a genuine set of values, making them their guide in decision making at every level, and engaging customers in an honest and transparent conversation about where they are when it comes to living up to those values--are the organizations that will win in the future.

Even a true radical like Kalle Lasn might agree. Lasn is the founder of Adbusters, the flame-throwing magazine and media foundation dedicated to revealing corporate hypocrisy and combating corporate hegemony, and the orchestrator of such anti-marketing stunts as "TV Turnoff Week" and "Buy Nothing Day." One of his latest initiatives is the creation of the ultimate anti-brand: Blackspot sneakers, an un-branded, ultra-ethical line of shoes (made of organic hemp and recycled tires, sweatshop free) launched as an attack on branding itself (and "hyper-branders" like Nike, McDonald's and Starbucks). Customers receive a "shareholder certificate" with their shoes, which qualifies them as a "voting members of the Blackspot Anticorporation" and grants them access to an online membership zone. What's more, the Blackspot un-logo is open-source and offered up to aspiring antipreneurs who want to create their own independent challenger brands.

It's an aggressive experiment in the limits of anti-branding--and there are signs it's taking hold. To date, Blackspot has sold some 25,000 pairs of shoes and given rise to a Blackspot café and a non-profit Blackspot consulting company in Canada. Not enough to give Nike a run for its money, surely--but maybe enough to inspire customers to think a little harder about where they put their money.

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