"Influential Advertising: Dove and Its Use of Rhetorical Elements in Commercials and Social Media"

Paulina Alvarez

Paulina Alvarez is an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. She is majoring in Advertising and Public Relations and double minoring in Digital Media and Psychology. She wrote this essay for her ENC 1102 class during her freshman year. Paulina wishes to continue learning how visual and written components influence human behavior in order to one day create her own effective advertising campaigns as an art director.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methods

Results & Discussion

Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendix A

Methods

To better understand how Dove uses its television advertisements and social media platforms to influence, communicate, and interact with its community, I conducted a thorough analysis of three of the company’s commercials and 160 social media posts. To do this, I first watched numerous Dove commercials on YouTube and then scrolled through the company’s Instagram and Twitter accounts, getting a feel for the content the brand provided. As I accomplished this, I focused on word choices and the pathos and ethos utilized in creating certain themes for the videos and social media posts that ultimately helped persuade, motivate, and educate Dove’s audience.

In these terms, pathos is the emotional appeal to the audience, pertaining mostly to encouragement, while ethos is the ethical appeal to the community’s sense of involvement. I noted the themes most commonly found in the commercials and social media posts, coming up with this observed rhetoric: Promoting Beauty/Strength/Positivity (PBSP), in which Dove helped customers realize their personal beauty potential; Encouraging the Community (EC), which indicated that Dove referred to its customers as a whole or as one identity; Encouraging the Individual (EI), where Dove wrote in a manner that only applied to a certain type of person; Sharing Personal Experiences (SPE), when Dove divulged certain happenings in its customers'/supporters' lives (with consent granted), allowing other customers to possibly relate to the stories; Selling a Product/Informing about a Product (SPIP), in which Dove promoted a product and/or informed its customers about it; and finally, Giving Thanks (GT), when Dove thanked customers for their support. Please note that these categories could overlap if one or more appeared in the video or social media post. 

Once I finished designing the code discussed above, I chose 160 Instagram posts and Tweets to analyze, selecting them based on how recent they were published as well as the number of likes, views, and/or retweets each of them had. I assigned each to the categories mentioned in the previous paragraph and calculated which themes were displayed the most and which ones were displayed the least. This allowed me to see what Dove finds important to portray to its audience.

Furthermore, I also chose three commercials to study. They were the viral video that brought Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” to prominence and two videos from the most recent years (2016 and 2017). This allowed for some bias because I personally chose the commercials; however, I based my selections on the videos’ significance and how recently they were broadcast. I then issued a survey asking participants to react to these three commercials and analyzed their opinions/feelings toward the videos. This allowed me to examine how they responded to word choices and the pathos and ethos used in the commercials—in other words, the themes displayed. The survey also asked participants to answer questions regarding their background with Dove so I could understand their level of knowledge with the company’s efforts. I made the survey through SurveyMonkey (see Appendix A) and directed it to only females (since the campaign mainly targets them) at both my old high school and my university's main campus (this allowed for larger age range). I received 15 responses out of the 20 people I sent the survey to.