It's More Than Your Average Soap

Tuesday, April 23, 2013
This Dove commercial uses Pathos all the way.  Having "average" people choke up as they see how other people described them appeals to our emotions.  The way that Dove has connected to their audience, mainly women, in this ad, is by bringing in the average Joe and Jane to participate in their little experiment.  Dove mainly brought in women due to the fact that, for the most part, women are more critical of their appearance than men.  Not only do the people in the ad appeal to our emotions but also the atmosphere caused by the music also elicits an emotional response.  The music that was playing throughout the ad was a calm and peaceful piano tune that made you, as the viewer, feel calm.  The peaceful music also appealed to our feelings by calming us down.  At the end of the ad, Dove gives us a little pick-me-up remark;
"You are more beautiful than you think."

I don't know if Dove thinks that they will sell more bars of soap if they give us compliments or what.  In this ad, they didn't once promote a specific product like a shampoo that will triple the volume of you hair, or something.  Maybe they are hoping that when we see any Dove product, we will think that it is going to compliment us, therefore it is better than any other product.  I thought that this ad was like one discussed in the Frontline episode we are watching about persuasion.  In the Frontline episode, there was a part where they mentioned the importance of making sure that the viewers connected the ad to a product or brand.  In this ad, you have to watch until the very end to see what it is advertising.  If I hadn't watched until the end, I would have thought that the video was an experiment that was carried out for the Scientific American or another science magazine. 

Another aspect of this ad that I was wondering about, was why they filmed the video the way they did.  During most of their camera shots, the sunlight was shining across the camera lens, bleaching the photo.  By my count, there were nine different shots that were bleached by the sun.  Also, most of the video was not perfectly still, you can see, in the video, the picture shaking a little bit.  The only reason I could come up with for why they shot the footage this way was to make the ad look "homely."  In home videos, most of the time, the video quality isn't too good.  Maybe Dove is hoping that we will see the add and connect the way the video was shot, to their own home videos, and to their home life.  If the viewers associate Dove with their home, they will want to buy Dove products for their home.

One more question that came to mind while watching this video was why they chose a forensic artist to do the drawings.  He wasn't just any forensic artist, he was an FBI-Trained Forensic artist who worked for the San Jose Police Department from 1995 to 2011.  If I was one of the people he was drawing, I would be a little scared that the person who was sketching me usually sketches pictures for the police to reference when trying to find a criminal.  Maybe this is why the contestants didn't know anything about the person who was sketching them, they would have been freaked out.  Dove could have found a sketch artist who didn't work for the police.  By finding a sketch artist that worked for the police, you know that the drawings will be pretty good.  Using an FBI-trained sketch artist also establishes Ethos, or credibility  on behalf of Dove.  Maybe Dove wanted to use someone who worked for the people of the United States in order to associate themselves with the idea of working for the good of the people.  He could just have been the first person on Dove's call list of sketch artists, but I think that there was some reason behind why they chose who they chose.

All in all, this advertisement was mainly focused on eliciting an emotional response from the viewers by saying that we are more beautiful than we give ourselves credit for.