Imagine a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety." That's the tagline for Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign, which has been turning heads since its launch in 2004. It's a simple but effective approach to persona marketing: They created ads around a topic they knew was sensitive but meaningful to their customers.
For example, in their Real Beauty Sketches campaign, they created ads around a social experiment in which an FBI-trained sketch artist was asked to draw a female volunteers twice: First, as each woman described herself and the second time, as a random stranger described her. The images that were drawn were completely different, and Dove accompanied this finding with a compelling statistic that only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.
The results? The different videos showing Dove's sketches were viewed more than 114 million times, shared 3.74 million times, uploaded in 25 languages, and seen in 110 countries. The PR and blogger media impression amounted to over 4 billion. It clearly resonated with their audience -- and people were touched both by the ads and by the statistics Dove used to back up their message.