Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

2. “Free Self-Esteem Tools?”: Brand Culture, Gender, and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign

| 39 2 “Free Self-Esteem Tools?” Brand Culture, Gender, and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign Sarah Banet-Weiser For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism In October 2006, promotion company Ogilvy and Mather created “Evolution,” a viral video for Dove Soap, the first in a series of videos stressing the importance of girls’ healthy self-esteem and encouraging critique of beauty industries. “Evolution” depicts an “ordinary” woman going through elaborate technological processes to become a “beautiful” model: through time-lapse photography, the woman is seen having makeup applied and hair curled and dried. The video then cuts to a computer screen, where the woman ’s face undergoes airbrushing to make her cheeks and brow smooth, as well as photo-shopping and computer manipulation to elongate her neck, widen her eyes, narrow her nose. The video does not make a subtle critique; rather, it intends to point out the artificiality and unreality of the women produced by and within the beauty industry. Indeed, the concluding tagline reads, “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. Take part in the Dove Real Beauty Workshops for Girls.” According to its website, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is “a global effort that is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty.”1 Harnessing the politicized rhetoric of commodity feminism, the “Evolution” video is clearly a product of a postfeminist environment, making a plea to consumers to act politically but through consumer behavior—in this case, by establishing brand loyalty to Dove products. Dove posted the video on YouTube, and it 40 | Brand, Culture, Action quickly became a viral hit, with millions of viewers sharing it through email and other media-sharing websites.2 Well received outside of advertising, the video also won the Viral and Film categories Grand Prix awards at Cannes Lions 2007. With its “self-esteem” workshops and bold claim that the campaign can be a “starting point for societal change,” the Dove Real Beauty campaign is a contemporary example of commodity activism, one of the new ways that advertisers and marketers have used brands as a platform for social activism . As we discuss throughout this volume, commodity activism is a practice that merges consumption behavior—buying and consuming products—with political or social goals, such as challenging the highly unattainable beauty norms produced by media and other industries. More specifically, however, contemporary forms of commodity activism are often animated by and experienced through brand platforms. Individual consumers act politically by purchasing particular brands over others in a competitive marketplace; specific brands are attached to political aims and goals, such as Starbucks coffee and fair trade, or a Product RED Gap T-shirt and fighting AIDS in Africa. Brands and, more generally, brand culture are the context in which contemporary commodity activism positions political action within a competitive , capitalist brand landscape, so that such activism is reframed as possible only when supporting particular brands. Thus, the vocabulary of brand culture is mapped on to political activism, so that the same forces that propel and legitimate competition among and between brands do the same kind of cultural work for activism. The brand is the legitimating factor, no matter what the specific political ideology or practice an individual might support. Brand Culture and Commodity Activism This chapter takes a closer look at this connection between brand culture and commodity activism by focusing on a specific case, the Dove Real Beauty campaign. In particular, this chapter looks at some of the elements of contemporary brand culture—consumer-generated content, digital technologies , immaterial labor, and, more generally, political subjectivities—as a way to demonstrate how the connections between brand culture and commodity activism are made normative in contemporary US culture. How do specific political goals—raising the self-esteem of young girls, for example—become understandable within the language of brands and the market? Related to this, how do brands become the most logical mechanism through which one can be active politically? How does brand culture utilize digital technologies | 41 2.1. The “Before” picture in Dove’s “Evolution” video. 2.2. “Transforming” through photo-shopping, Dove “Evolution...