Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Apparently women tweet five million times a year with negative comments about their body and self image. Dove wanted to do something about this and so, built around the Oscars, it launched a campaign to get people to #SpeakBeautiful

Any time you campaign around a hashtag you create a risk. The tag #McDStories bounced rather badly on McDonalds. The problem is that you have no control over how people will actually use the hashtag but can easily be caught in the blowback. McDonalds should have recognised that it has a dedicated band of critics who share an analysis of what is wrong with McDonalds. They are more likely to share each other's content than the much larger group of people who buy burgers under the Golden Arches. 

Dove is not as contentious as McDonalds, but is nonetheless inviting similar criticism. For all sorts of reasons – maybe humorously or maybe out of an objection to Dove, and its owners, Unilever, people were always going to chime in with negative comments.

This has not been researched yet, but a quick search for the hashtag shows more positive comments than negative. That's to be expected but, significantly (and also to be expected) the negative comments may be getting better traction.

Some detailed research into how much content sharing went on, and how much was negative, would make very interesting reading.

For the moment, shall we just say this is probably not the sort of thing that Dove was aiming at:

Amanda Nelson ‏@ImAmandaNelson  3h3 hours ago

Dove's parent company pushes skin-lightening creams to Asian women but hey if I say nice things I guess I'll feel better? #SpeakBeautiful