Using self-identity and brand personality in advertising appeals: a Unilever Dove case study.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The rise in popular culture and the growing power of brands led to factoring consumers and their self-concept, their buying power and interests as a part of the strategies implemented for the purpose of advertising. Brand development and the sustainability of brands over time required the adjustment of looking at brands from a singular lens of mass production to that of consumer-driven interest. Meanwhile, within consumer studies, an in-depth look into consumer habits and behaviours from their everyday life experience garnered the attention of cultural studies academics. Thus, slowly resulted in the academic debate of consumer consumption power and what that power meant for the lives consumers lived and impact consumption power has on different cultures and subcultures. Both frontiers of academia, namely that of cultural studies and marketing resulted in corpus discoveries of academic literature that contributed to the understanding of consumers within the market. Consumer Cultural Theory (CCT) was born out of the necessity to try and understand the ever-evolving role of the consumer within the market and the impacting role that the consumer can play based on their levels of consumption. CCT was an attempt taken by scholars to try and integrate marketing and cultural studies with the hopes that this integration will provide beneficial results in the development of consumer studies. The diversity in the academic approaches to studying consumers within these disciplines became an integral reason behind researching from an interdisciplinary standpoint. With this study, it is pertinent to investigate brand development through consumer cultural meaning by studying to understand the influence of an individual’s self-identity and brand personality could impact the advertisements they chose to engage. The Dove Real Beauty Campaign utilised as a reference to brand managers understanding consumers and a means of looking into the beauty industry. This study focuses on the resonance of the self-identity (widely studied within cultural studies) to the creation of advertising appeals (studied at great length within marketing)