THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DOVE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL BEAUTY IN AFFECTING CUSTOMERS’ PURCHASE DECISION TOWARD DOVE PRODUCTS

Abstract

The emergence of social marketing campaign strategy has encouraged businesses to adopt it as their marketing strategy. However, although nowadays companies are continuously creating unique social marketing campaigns, many of them end up backfiring. Therefore, companies should create campaigns that are able to draw customers to participate and create purchase decisions. Dove brings a campaign that promotes women’s self-esteem through brand building and serves dual goals to make women feel more beautiful and sell more products, called Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. This study aims to analyze how the campaign affects customers’ purchase decisions toward the products. From the study, the factors in the campaign that affect customers’ purchase decisions toward the products will be identified. Finally, this study aims to develop marketing recommendations for the campaign to affect customers’ purchase decisions toward the products. This study uses semi-structured interviews and online survey methods to collect data and uses open coding and PLS-SEM to analyze the relationship between the variables. The results indicate that positive word-of-mouth significantly affects consumer-campaign (CC) identification, perceived cause-related marketing (CRM) motive significantly affects emotional attachment, and affective reaction, brand trust, and brand community significantly affect customers’ purchase decision through attitude toward the campaign, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intention. This study is expected to enhance marketer understandings of how the company could improve purchase decisions through social marketing campaign strategy.