Change the rhyme. A movement to challenge stereotypes.

Women in India are often discouraged from making a career in sports as it is believed to lessen their physical attractiveness — athletic frames lose out the desire for feminine curves, broken teeth to a perfectly aligned set, tanned skin to fair, and glowing skin

Around the Olympics, there is a huge increase in conversation around beauty.

In recent sporting events in India, it’s women who have been bringing home the glory. India left Rio de Janeiro with only two medals. These medals were awarded only to the female athletes for the first time in history.

Why not use the world’s biggest sporting event, The Olympics, when eyes are trained usually on male athletes to celebrate the amazingness of real women and beauty in India.

The campaign was designed to be led by digital and was deployed across India’s three largest social platforms—Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. While the main video resided on YouTube, Facebook and twitter played the role of social provocation and sharing.

The campaign also leveraged the equity of the lifestyle and culture editorial platform, Blush, by hosting the video on the partner’s channel. This helped increase organic traction as it capitalised on the channel’s practice of challenging the status quo through provocative content.

The campaign hashtag—#changetherhyme—challenged audiences to re-write definitions of beauty by penning alternative versions of the rhyme, and, thereby engaged consumers with the concept of beauty stereotypes and Dove’s point of view on “Real Beauty”.

#changetherhyme, riding the high of the victories of Indian women in the Olympics, engaged with 6.1 million people on YouTube with over 35% organic views against an industry benchmark of 11%. It clocked 29 million impressions on twitter and another 7.2 million on Facebook, far exceeding any previous Dove masterbrand campaign in India.

Celebrities like popular TV host and Bollywood actress Renuka Shahane also penned alternative versions of the Rhyme for social media.

Needless to say, the campaign succeeded in moving brand scores also significantly:

1. 58% of consumers associated Dove with Real Beauty

2. 4% increase in “makes you feel self-assured”

3. 4% increase in “Inspires women to feel more positive about the way they look”