More PR Beauty from Dove
Monday, November 13th, 2006By: Allen Adamson
There are two tricks to using PR in Brand building. The first and most difficult is to get the media to cover the story. The second is to make sure the story is told the way you want it told. Not the way they want it spun. As I explain in my book BrandSimple, Dove is great at getting PR to work as a powerful branding tool.
The recent rapid-movement video of a young woman being transformed from perfectly fine to perfectly fabulous through tricks of the beauty and technology trades is a perfect example of PR as branding power app. The core message of the video is, course, that models don’t really look the way we see them in ads. It beautifully underscores Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.
Over the past few weeks the video has made the media rounds from Oprah to Ellen to Leno. It went on to become among the most-watched videos on You Tube – the latest gauge of public opinion. Dove got millions of eyeballs without having to spend millions on advertising, underscoring the power of its PR. It was able to get its tale told and retold - the way it wanted it told.
I thought Dove had gone as far as they could go using PR when they launched the real Beauty campaign last year, but they figured out how to take it to the next level and ride the You Tube wave to unlock even more PR horsepower….Wow.