The Campaign

Even in a richly diverse India, there is a long-standing beauty stereotype of the “classical Indian beauty”, the quintessential Punjabi girl – tall and fair with long straight hair. Media and society has been parading this for decades now. Young girls grow up, trying to confirm with these notions of beauty, which eventually turn into anxieties by the time they are women. We chose 10 such anxieties and turned each of it into a celebration of a woman’s beauty; through a set of beautifully crafted “Tiny Tales”. These 10 different tales/stories, aimed to realign the beauty ideal from ONE QUINTESSENTIAL NORM into a celebration of INDIAN DIVERSITY, #RealBeauty. We partnered with Terribly Tiny Tales (TTT), India’s most celebrated social storytelling platform, who helped us craft these 10 terribly tiny tales, which imbibed the Dove message. The format was extremely critical, as she needed less than 10seconds to consume each tale.

Creative Execution

We handpicked the 25 best women writers from India, women much like the Dove woman, out of the 25,000 strong globally pool of the TTT community writers. Each of these writers were given the theme of #RealBeauty, breaking the straight-jacketed notions of beauty, and celebrating Indian diversity. We shortlisted 10 of the best tales to be published across key social media channels. We chose the 3 most popular platforms amongst Dove women; Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Each of these platform was conducive to both consumption and sharing/reactions. Starting at Noon, on International Woman’s Day, we posted one Terribly Tiny Tale at the start of the hour. And we followed each tale by posting another at the start of the next hour (1pm and so on). A community of approximately 1 Million TTT fans collectively on these platforms, set the stage for Dove’s #RealBeauty initiative in India.

We got an overwhelming response. The 10 tales that started at 12pm and ended at 8pm, reached a total of 3.4 million people online, 183,000 total reactions, 4,500 total comments and 4,700 total shares. A Writer’s feedback: Jenai Dalal, 18 year old writer from Mumbai “It’s themes like this I love writing on. Themes that make me look within. And write about things that I probably wouldn’t say aloud, but wish I did. It’s nice to have someone telling me to stay beautiful, instead of showing me how to be.” A reader’s response to a tale on Grey Hair: Adwaita Das, from Pune “I was convinced to keep colouring my genetically grey hair to look ‘beautiful’. Now I’m stopping. I have realized, that beauty is what I feel is beautiful.”

In a country as diverse as India, with a population of 631 million women, it’s quite an anomaly that there is only one beauty ideal- the archetypal Tall-Slim-Fair girl. Thanks to Bollywood & advertising, Indian women feed on these ideals while growing up, which eventually turn into anxieties. On International Women’s Day, when the world goes gaga about extraordinary women, Dove wanted to take a unique approach & celebrate #RealBeauty. We crafted 10 Terribly-Tiny-Tales, bargained for 10seconds/tale & released them every hour on the D-Day. And that’s how we turned her anxieties into a celebration of #RealBeauty!

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

The Dove woman who is typically aged between 18-40 years spends close to an hour every day online where she connects with her friends and family and takes a peak into the world around her. Hence, we chose social media platforms as the seeding ground for our attempt at rebalancing the beauty ideal(s) and released these tales on the occasion of International Women’s Day. Our approach was unique, on a day when the world celebrated womanhood with a lot of focus on the roles that women play & their achievements, we gave her a reason to let go of her inhibitions and celebrate her anxieties. But we also knew that on Woman’s Day, she would be inundated with messages from apparels, to jewelry, to insurance. Here, the short tale format enabled us to cut straight through the noise.