During the summer, Dove loses preference to other beauty brands that hold sunscreams as part of their portfolio, such as Nivea and O Boticario. Because of the halo effect in communication, those brands dominate the conversations during the summer period, affecting Dove's brand performance.

The brand conducted a research about the relationship of Brazilians with the summer alongside institute IDEIA that showed 42% of fat people in Brazil had simply stopped going to the beach because they didn't feel welcome. Realizing fat people are 57% of the Brazilian population, and thus a very important demographic for the brand, Dove decided to tackle this audience.

Dove was also kicking off its new positioning, "let's change beauty", so we needed to come up with something that could actually change the structure for beauty standards while winning the conversations about beauty during the summer.

After months of product development, Dove went beyond its business in the beauty market and launched the biggest, widest and sturdiest beach chair to ever exist. But we didn't sell it. We've made the chairs available to borrow for free in the busiest beaches in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, in an activation called "A Seat in the Sun". People just had to scan a QR code, book the chair online for free and show off their beauty by the beach.

We also promoted talks, debates, and parties at no costs in the activation to truly welcome everyone, raising awareness and promoting education about the matter. At the end of the campaign, we distributed all the chairs produced to more than 100 existing kiosks that already offer chairs to borrow all over Brazil so people could enjoy the Dove chair all year round.

We needed a PR strategy to gain conversations during the summertime. So, we started financing a research about beauty and summer along with IDEIA institute that showed 42% of fat people in Brazil had stopped going to the beach because the environment is not welcoming and there are no chairs for them, once they've broken standard chairs in the past or they don't fit in any of the existing ones.

The data from the research was paramount to come up with the idea of creating a chair for bigger bodies, and helped us prove to lifestyle and innovation journalists the relevance of its launch. Fat people are the majority of the population in Brazil (57%) and an important demographic for Dove's business challenges, so we also targeted fat journalists, body positive influencers, activists and bloggers by sending the chair to them or inviting them to visit the kiosks on the

First, we financed the chair development alongside a trusted manufacturer based on calculations for thigh width (31 winches), hip depth and weight support (440lbs). Then, we tested it and assured it was approved by local regulatory organs. We then produced 300 units to make them available to borrow for free in Dove kiosks in 4 of the busiest beaches in Rio de Janeiro (Copacabana, Ipanema, Leme, and Arpoador) during the summer (February and part of March). In one of them, we also promoted talks and debates. In order to book the chairs, people just had to visit a landing page and choose the chair and the period of use.

After the activation, we produced more chairs in large scale and distributed them to more than one hundred existing beach kiosks in Brazil, so it wouldn't be just a brand activation, but actually a service people could use all year round.

"Sometimes the obvious is the real ground-breaking", as one of the journalists wrote about the chair. The chairs were borrowed more than 3,000 times during the activation period on Dove's beach kiosks. Besides, 82 stories were written in the press about the chair - among internet, social media, magazines, newspapers and broadcasts - which helped us reach 60 million organic unique impacts. Dove brand mentions index increased +312%, the first time it happened during the summertime in years. Besides, the brand reputation attribute "I agree Dove is changing beauty" jumped from 71% to 94% (Kantar, Dec '22 versus Mar'23).

Due to the interest of other manufacturers in the chair engineering, we decided to make the design and production assets an open source file, available online for any manufacturer wanting to produce it for sale, which is already happening.