Responsible marketing - does it exist?!

For our second cross-curricular inquiry assignment I decided to do a lesson plan on the following PLO: Identify the social legal and ethical issues involved in marketing products and services. This topic encompass such a wide area that I spent a long time doing searches on the internet trying to narrow it down. I finally ended up focusing on the issue of body image and how stereotypes are reinforced in advertisement. I found some really interesting things.

In 2004, Dove launched the Campaign for Real Beauty that feature real women of different shapes and sizes instead of models. According to a press release, Dove wants “to make women feel more beautiful every day by challenging today's stereotypical view of beauty and inspiring women to take great care of themselves.” The use of women “of various ages, shapes and sizes” is designed “to provoke discussion and debate about today's typecast beauty images.”

In 2006 Dove launched the Evolution ad, which spurred hundreds of copy-cat time-lapse videos of Photoshop beauty routines on Youtube.

And then followed up in 2007 with Onslaught. Both of these ads contain powerful and positive messages on body image.

However, I wonder if it is a bit insincere for Dove to portray such powerful messages with the goal of selling its own products. Boosting women's self confidence and changing typecast images are great, but the root of the problem still exist: the fashion industry ads, and teen magazines that depend on these adverts for survival - the unrealistic model image still persists.

A little more digging revealed that Dove's parent company, Unilever, also owns Axe, a product line notorious for its objectification of women. I'm not familiar with corporate business so I have no idea if Unilever can actually do anything about that since Dove and Axe are two separate companies.
Here's a video "exposing" this little fact:

Turns out this video is made by a marketing firm specializing in on-line promotions and viral marketing, which immediately makes the intent and purpose of this video suspect. Of course, used effectively, viral marketing can be a great use for positive change. By making a parody video of Dove's Onslaught, Greenpeace managed to have Unilever, the the biggest single buyer of palm oil in the world, to agree to support an immediate moratorium on deforestation for palm oil plantations. That's just amazing!