In India, 90% of marriages are “arranged” by the family. Arranged marriage by itself is not an oppressive institution, but the standards it upholds in India are. Even today, the groom and his family look for a perfect- fair, slim, tall bride during matchmaking process. In a diverse country of 631 Mn women, that’s an unrealistic beauty expectation. The pressure to conform to these parameters continues to pull down her self-esteem from the time she is born until she is married and sometimes even beyond.

Dove, India's leading beauty-brand believes that beauty should be source of confidence, not anxiety. However, over the years its multiple global insights on a ‘women’s beauty and inclusivity’ failed to resonate with the Indian women.

The objective was to call out pre-marriage scrutiny of bride's weight, height, colour, and hair to shake the deep rooted Indian cultural habits with Dove’s 'Real Beauty' stance.

A commissioned study by Dove called ‘India’s beauty test’ revealed that:

7/10 women believe matrimonial sites and ads should ban the use of the words ‘Slim, Tall, Fair’.

Dove believes that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

‘Stop the Beauty Test’ was a movement that questioned the age-old scrutiny and beauty-based biases faced by every Indian bride during an arranged marriage set-up.

However the big moment of truth was matrimonial touchpoints who were the big perpetrators of this unfair testing.

Online and Print Matrimony platforms fuelled the tradition by allowing grooms and their families to use beauty stereotype words like ‘Fair, Slim, Tall, Beautiful’ in their matrimonial ads.

The idea was to tell both prospective grooms and communities at large to stop testing women on perfect beauty ideals but celebrate real beauty.

#StopTheBeautyTest wasn’t just meant for women, it was targeted to every individual, community and the society at large that continued fuelling arranged marriages with toxic beauty biases.

A typical arranged marriage still works in a way where the individual’s parents initiate, search and filter partners through their community, or by advertising on matrimonial websites or newspapers.

Two key audience segments were identified:

- Bride-seekers

- Beauty-seekers

The media strategy was to spark a conversation and inspire the ‘Beauty seekers’, the core audience for Dove and De-bias the ‘Bride seekers’ at their ‘very moment of truth’.

#stopthebeautytest campaign was divided into three phases:

Spark:

- #stopthebeautytest campaign went live across multiple TV channels, Digital media and Print.

Inspire:

- For the first time, World’s leading matrimonial platform-Shaadi.com, a non-advertising website, collaborated with Dove with shared belief. And made ‘every bride’ profile nudge every bride-seeker with 'real beauty' messages before they look at her complete profile.

- On matrimonial classified section in a leading Indian daily, Dove re-wrote the age old 'biased matrimony ad' without using words like Fair, Slim, Tall etc.

- For the first time, ‘rejected brides’ of this campaign became the ‘Cover Girls’ of the biggest fashion publisher in the country.

- Inspiring stories of ‘rejected brides’ went viral across purpose platforms like Humans of Bombay and Hum Insaan.

Share:

- Multiple Influencers joined the cause sharing their personal stories and pledged to #stopthebeautytest.

#stopthebeautytest was a fully integrated, high scale, high impact campaign

• In one month, campaign reached 75% of households.

• Digital and social platforms garnered cumulative 600 Mn+ impressions

• 2 million organic views on day 1.

• Over 2.5 Mn engaged and shared their stories

• Earned PR value of USD 330,000.

Uplift in brand perception:

• 800 BPS increase - ‘Inspires women to feel more positive about the way they look and feel’

• 1300 Bps increase - ‘Leads the way in evolving conversations on beauty and self-esteem’

• 1200 Bps increase - ‘Challenges negative beauty stereotypes and is redefining beauty’

The biggest-matchmaking platforms made unprecedented decisions to support making the marriage process free of beauty-biases.

• Shaadi.com - Garnering 143 Mn impressions with deep integrations on bride profiles.

• Times Matrimonial - Partnered Dove to help their users rewrite their matrimony ads- reaching 3.7Mn.