There is a Dove display at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne that has not changed since spring. Same bottles, same soft photography, same promise. I stood in front of it last week thinking about how much work that display used to do, and how much of that work is now being done by press statements.
Earlier this month Dove pulled a Facebook ad and apologized for it. Three frames, a black woman removing her shirt, a white woman underneath. The apology was fast, it was contrite, and it was the second one this year.
In May it was the body-shaped bottles. Same brand, same equity, same sequence. Launch, backlash, pull, apologize, move on.
When a brand apologizes twice in six months out of the same equity, the apology has stopped being a correction and started being the product.
Real Beauty has been running since 2004. Thirteen years of a genuinely good idea, executed well often enough to buy Dove the thing most brands never get: the benefit of the doubt. That benefit is real currency. It buys patience when you stumble and attention when you speak.
Here is the part that gets lost. Equity that large starts working as insurance inside the building. If everybody in the room already believes the brand is trusted on this subject, nobody has to be the person who asks whether this particular execution earns that trust. The equity does the arguing. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and it is never malice. It is confidence.
Three things I would want on the wall if I worked on this account. One, the equity is not a permission slip, it is a standard, and the standard gets harder to clear every year you keep claiming it. Two, somebody at the approval table needs the assigned job of being wrong out loud, with enough rank to survive it. Three, cleanup is not work. An apology is a withdrawal, not a deposit.
An apology is a withdrawal, not a deposit.
The frustrating thing is that Dove is not a bad brand. It competes in a category built almost entirely on claims about pores, and more than a decade ago it chose a harder and better position. That choice still holds up. What has slipped is the distance between the position and the daily output, and that distance is where both of this year's apologies came from. Nobody launches an ad like that on purpose. People launch it when the review is a formality.
Truffles and Barnaby have never apologized for anything, including what they did to my headphones in August, and they have the enormous advantage of not standing for anything. Every brand that does stand for something is signing up for a harder review process, permanently. That is the bill. Dove has been paying it in public all year.