Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty and Microsegmentation



Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty offers an interesting reading on "discontinuous microsegmentation" by advertising campaigns (Terranova 34).

The advertising campaign (according to Dove) celebrates women of different body types and inspires them to have confidence in oneself. It reaches the market through typical advertisement, workshops, and short films that can be streamed online.

Above is a photograph of the most common ad for the campaign. It features a montage of women of different races and body types; it has broken down women by different segmented identities. And yet these microsegments-heavy set Black woman, tatooed Asian woman, lean Blonde White woman, etc.-have been "reduced to recombinable elements...and recomposed" by means of being part of an advertising campaign which places them as part of the same movement(Terranova, 35). Distinct identities have been "disassociated from their subjects" (35) and recombined in opposition to the typical American standard of beauty. This grouping seems to reinforce an "othering effect": there is an American standard of beauty but there is also something other than it, the microsegements of the Dove campaign, and this type of beauty should be appreciated as well.

This leads me to several questions.
How can microsegments within a network be grouped for political/social ends?
What are these microsegments in opposition to/how do they function outside of the mass?

-Jamie Lynn Harris



1 comment:

pooja said...

jamie--did you see that nic posted about this same ad in week 2 (postmodernism)?