For Indian women, the conditioning to become "suitable brides" starts very young; perpetuating beauty stereotypes that can severely impact their self-esteem when it's still fragile. A national survey revealed that this body-shaming is now rampant even online, as 89% of women reported feeling uncomfortable about themselves when they read comments about other people’s appearances across digital platforms.

With Indian kids being the youngest to reach mobile maturity worldwide, 60 million adolescent girls are online, with over 77% of them spending 56% of their time on social media & messaging apps. This significantly puts them at risk to experience online body shaming from family, friends and followers.

Dove driven by its purpose of challenging beauty biases & building a deeper connection with local audience, wanted to make a meaningful contribution to tackle this deep-rooted cultural issue by creating preventive interventions.

A Dove study discovered that 80% of schoolgirls in India face the beauty test. With 60mn adolescent girls engaging with 456mn Indian adults who are now online, these beauty tests have seeped into their conversations on social media and chat apps. This inspired the brand to change the nature of online conversations, by making them re-think the words they use when speaking to young girls.

Dove launched a unique, real-time intervention on the smartphone keyboard, the very medium used to body shame girls. It identified users typing body shaming comments, sensitized them on the impact of their words before they press send by reminding them that beauty comes in all forms and educated them on how to build beauty confidence in young girls.

The innovation leveraged the power of AI to make human interactions more humane, Thumbstopping Beauty Biases one conversation at a time.

With the increase in smartphone penetration across the country, AI-powered mobile keyboards have become increasingly popular as they make online conversations more fun, engaging and interactive. These applications share predictive words/emojis/GIF and sticker suggestions with users, based on their typing activity. The brand leveraged this ability of keyboards to catch body shamers in the act of conducting their next beauty test, in real-time.

We built our unique intervention through 3 data-analytical techniques -

1. Diagnostic - Primary research with young girls to understand the types of body-shaming comments they hear.

2. Predictive - Social listening across 61 million occurrences to identify common words/expressions used online

3. Prescriptive - Mapping actual keyboard stroke data to validate their frequency of usage & applying machine learning to extrapolate a list of trigger keywords (including misspellings, colloquial language and expressions) that are specifically targeted to females, ensuring we reach the maximum intended audience.

On analyzing our data, we discovered three common forms of body shaming online: size (80%), hair (10%), and color (5%). Most used comments under each form were mapped with the contextual AI of a mobile keyboard, converting them into triggers to power our intervention.

A thought-provoking message was crafted for each of these comments and then presented to users typing them, in the form of a predictive text pop-up. These pop-ups were strategically placed between the text field and keyboard, creating a powerful, un-interruptive, moment-of-truth activation. Clicking on them led users to the "Dove Self Esteem Project", a website that offers tools and resources on learning how to build body confidence in young girls.

In no time, this innovation influenced over 1.3 million conversations to be more mindful of a young girl’s self-esteem, enabling a choice for the online audience to stop the beauty tests when interacting with them.

In just 1 month, the innovation showed promising results:

Behavioral Impact:

• Upto 18% reduction in size-based comments on the keyboard

• Upto 10.5% reduction in color-based comments on the keyboard

Media Measures:

• 7.4% increase in brand awareness

• 28.5% increase in branded content recall

• 8.99% CTR on the innovative Dove pop-ups

• 10X increase in website traffic on Dove’s Self-Esteem Programme

• 1.5X increase in content downloads from Dove’s Self-Esteem Programme

• Organic PR value was approximately EUR 130K

Mind Measures: 

• Dove “Inspires women to feel more positive about the way they look” brand score went up by 10.1%

• Dove “Believes that women of all kinds are beautiful.” Up by 15.3%

• Dove “Helping build the self-esteem of women in society” Up by 8.7%