Unilever historically customized its products and marketing for local markets, allowing for local responsiveness but raising costs. For Dove, Unilever pursued a global branding strategy to reduce costs in production, R&D, and marketing by standardizing the brand worldwide. Emerging social conditions in the late 20th century, like efforts to expand the definition of beauty to include women of all types, made a global campaign around "real beauty" feasible. While globally branded, Unilever still tweaked Dove's campaign between nations to account for cultural differences in views of beauty, appropriate messaging, and consumer behavior across countries.
Unilever historically customized its products and marketing for local markets, allowing for local responsiveness but raising costs. For Dove, Unilever pursued a global branding strategy to reduce costs in production, R&D, and marketing by standardizing the brand worldwide. Emerging social conditions in the late 20th century, like efforts to expand the definition of beauty to include women of all types, made a global campaign around "real beauty" feasible. While globally branded, Unilever still tweaked Dove's campaign between nations to account for cultural differences in views of beauty, appropriate messaging, and consumer behavior across countries.
Unilever historically customized its products and marketing for local markets, allowing for local responsiveness but raising costs. For Dove, Unilever pursued a global branding strategy to reduce costs in production, R&D, and marketing by standardizing the brand worldwide. Emerging social conditions in the late 20th century, like efforts to expand the definition of beauty to include women of all types, made a global campaign around "real beauty" feasible. While globally branded, Unilever still tweaked Dove's campaign between nations to account for cultural differences in views of beauty, appropriate messaging, and consumer behavior across countries.
Unilever historically customized its products and marketing for local markets, allowing for local responsiveness but raising costs. For Dove, Unilever pursued a global branding strategy to reduce costs in production, R&D, and marketing by standardizing the brand worldwide. Emerging social conditions in the late 20th century, like efforts to expand the definition of beauty to include women of all types, made a global campaign around "real beauty" feasible. While globally branded, Unilever still tweaked Dove's campaign between nations to account for cultural differences in views of beauty, appropriate messaging, and consumer behavior across countries.
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International Business – BUAD 327
November 6, 2011
Dove – Building a Global Brand: Case Study
1. Historically Unilever has had a reputation for customizing its product offerings and marketing messages to local market conditions. What are the benefits of this approach? What are the drawbacks? - With Unilever customizing its product offerings and marketing messages to local market conditions, they were able to maximize local responsiveness to their products. This was done through local marketing research, knowing what the people use and how they can tailor their particular product to the specific population, and ultimately make the most profit. It showed that they were innovative and there brand was compatible. A plus side to this strategy is that populations would probably look for their products in the future, knowing that they tailor their products to the local market and Unilever probably increased their partnership network with local markets and/or firms. - The drawback of Unilever customizing its product offerings and marketing messages to local conditions is that customization is time consuming and raises costs. Responding to local market conditions in an attempt to accommodate diverse demands from different consumers, results in more time being spent creating different standards for each customized product, and the end result is raise costs for the firm. Another drawback of customizing product offerings and marketing messages to local market conditions is not getting the customizing conditions right and consumers end up using the product, not liking it, and never using the product again, which will cause the financial performance of the firm to fall.
2. Why do you think Unilever chose to move away from its local customization strategy, and tried to position Dove as a global brand? What emerging conditions in the global marketplace made this strategy feasible? - I think Unilever chose to move away from its local customization strategy, and pushed for Dove to become a global brand was to improve its financial performance. Global branding is a low-cost strategy than customizing to a local market. Producing and marketing the product is cheaper, as well as research and development (R &D) activities of the market. With this strategy, they are able to duplicate these functions and market a standard product worldwide, instead of reinventing the wheel, so they can earn the maximum benefits from sales. Taking the global brand approach makes more sense especially when the demand for local customization of Dove was low and the goal is to reduce costs. - At the time, there was a growing effort for countries wanting to expand the definition of beauty from women of all walks of life, regardless of shape, size, and age. Canada has a traveling exhibition, called the Dove Photo Tour, which received a lot or positive press. Germany came up with a concept for conveying “real beauty” by focusing on ordinary women, instead of models, and there was research suggested that there was a need for Dove to position themselves as a global brand, and in turn push for a campaign to define “real beauty.”
3. Do you think Unilever could have pursued the same basic strategy 30 years ago? If not, why not, and what has changed to make it possible today? International Business – BUAD 327 November 6, 2011
- No, because 30 years ago women in the United States let alone, around the world, were still fighting for their civil rights. This strategy may not have been safe for women in other countries to present themselves as beautiful regardless of what shape, size, or age they were, because there was a different and bigger fight at that time. Women may not have been taken seriously, because with Dove’s strategy focusing on beauty, the focus would not have been on important issues such as equal pay, legal equality, gender-based violence, and full equality for women and girls to eliminate discrimination.
4. Despite being globally branded, Unilever still tweaked the Dove campaign from nation to nation. Why did it do this? What does this tell you about national differences in consumer behavior? - Unilever tweaked the Dove campaign from nation to nation to take local sensibilities into account and tailor the Dove campaign message accordingly. I’m sure research was done and most likely revealed that different countries have different views on what they define as beauty. Also, there are cultural differences in defining beauty. There are also different standards in regards to expressing beauty, different languages used to communicate beauty, different attitudes towards defining beauty and they had to be careful on how they advertised beauty, to not offend there consumers. With this said, tweaking there Dove campaign showed that there are national differences that influence consumers across different nations to purchase a product and the mentioned differences definitely have to be taken into account.
