Brand identity plays an important role in positioning products and companies in the minds of consumers. In gaining a deeper appreciation for the importance of developing a positive brand identity and related marketing strategy, you are going to focus on the globally recognized personal care products of Dove and will address questions related to a real-world case study on the brand. For starters, you can discover more about the brand by going to their website at the following address:www.dove.com

You will then learn more about the marketing and branding challenges of Dove, by reading the case study on page 224225 of our ebook (attached)

Address the following questions: (please note the questions here are slightly different than those in the ebook and you should only address the questions that follow here.)

1. The Dove Real Beauty campaign used a unique message to successfully market its products, but beneath that message was the effective understanding of basic marketing fundamentals. What are those fundamentals?
2. As a result of its Real Beauty marketing campaign, Dove's sales soared and it attracted many new customers. What can the Company do to retain these customers?
3. If a brand is a promise, what does the Dove brand promise its customers?
4. What can a company that sells services, rather than commodities, take away from Dove's experience?
5. Building upon the business you would like to open up, what would differentiate your brand from competitors?

6. Think back to the last time you started using a different business to purchase a product, or service, that you regularly needed.

a. What was the product, or service, and what company had you been using to get the product, or service, before you made the switch?

b. Why did you switch to a new company?

c. How did you find out that this new business had the product, or service that you wanted?

d. What did you know about the new business, before you made the switch from the old business you had been using?

e. After you had been using the new business, what did you learn about the new business that was different from what you thought you knew when you made the decision to switch to this new business?

f. After you had been using the new business, did anything happen at the new business that caused you to want to switch either back to the old business you were using, or to another newer business?

True Branding Comes from Within: Dove Beauty Dove is a brand of personal care products owned by the multinational firm Uni- lever. The products are sold in more than 25 countries, and although the brand has long been well recognized, its products-bar soap, cleansing cream, sham- poo, and conditioner-are considered commodities. Dove had decades of mar- keting history promoting its soap as gentler for skin than ordinary soap, but in challenge an extremely crowded and competitive market, the brand was losing ground. By launching an aggressive and revolutionary advertising campaign featuring Find a way to give a commodity "real women" rather than professional models, Dove was able to become the product a distinct brand identity No. 1 cleansing brand and today is growing at more than 25 percent annually.' and personality When a product category is commoditized (meaning it's widely available and interchangeable with the same types of products from other companies), solution companies find it increasingly difficult to differentiate their products from their competitors' products, and are typically forced to compete on price alone. Create a campaign featuring Given that Dove had always been marketed as a premium product with a nonmodels to whom real higher price tag than competitive products, this created a significant problem women could relate for Unilever. One way to fight commoditization is to build a strong brand with a personal identity that transcends a product's actual function. This is what Unile- ver achieved with Dove, when, in 2004, it launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.Beauty. The idea behind the campaign was to reject the unnatural, unattainable image of women typically featured in beauty advertisements. Rather than using waif-thin and seemingly perfect (and mostly Caucasian) professional models to market Dove's beauty products, Dove decided to feature a wide variety of women of different sizes, shapes, and ethnic types. The goal was to connect with the more than 95 percent of women who do not conform to the ideals established by the beauty industry and inspire them to feel comfortable in their own bodies and recognize that, as the powerful Dove slogan said, "true beauty comes from within." The campaign was first launched in the United Kingdom (parent com- pany Unilever is a British-Dutch company). The women photographed were recruited in a variety of ways. Some were approached on the street; others answered advertisements in local newspapers. Rankin, a noted British portrait and fashion photographer, was chosen as art director because of his worldwide reputation for photographing unconventional models and for bringing out his subjects' personality. As part of the series, Dove paid for billboard ads ask- ing people viewing them to dial a toll-free number and vote on whether the woman on the billboard was "fat" or "fab," with the votes shown in real-time on the board. "The Dawn Daal Danutu A fara Chudu" hunliuin Cadriana and I sues Uandarran