Dove Men+Care ~ A close look at the male sector of the female dominated skin care brand

{Social Media Monitoring Assignment: Part One} 

When I think of the Dove skin care company, the first thing that comes to mind is WOMEN. 

I have been a loyal customer for the past six years and love the message their Campaign for Real Beauty gives to women, especially young girls.  To me, they are an example of a company who promotes a message that I believe in and a brand that I trust.

But that is not what I will be focusing on.

I will be exploring the facet of Dove that some people neglect (or do not know) to acknowledge: The MEN'S CARE.

As a company that has almost exclusively targeted a female audience, Dove took a risk launching the Dove Men+Care line of hair, body, and face products for men.  The ad campaign for Dove Men+Care was launched in February 2010 during the Super Bowl.  The message was plainly "You are a man who is comfortable with who you are, now you should be comfortable in your own skin."  This add had an excellent initial response and gave the Dove company a new face.

The 2010 Super Bowl Commercial that started it all

Over the past few weeks, I took an in depth look at the Dove Men+Care groundswell presence and social media marketing strategy.  Choosing Dove Men+Care as the case study in my social monitoring project will help me learn more about a part of a brand that I have come to love and trust. I will be opening the door to the marketing world and attempt to give back to the brand with the skills I have attained through amateur social media marketing experience.

This overarching social monitoring project aims to create a portfolio of the brand's character, habits and voice in the social media world as well as a personal analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.

Campaign Analysis:

The Dove Men+Care advertising campaign has seems to be focused mainly within the groundswell and on broadcast television.  The company's brand ambassadors are friendly, relatable looking men and dad, and professional athletes (in particular, football players Doug Flutie and John Ellway). By utilizing various social media monitoring sites (such as SocialMention, Addictomatic, Icerocket, Google Trends to name a few) as well as looking into their Facebook, twitter, youtube, and flickr accounts, I have been able to look at how successful the brand has been within the past few weeks.

Facebook

The cover photo seems to target loving fathers and every day men

The Dove Men+Care Facebook page is more or less a place where employees post campaign photos, share information about products, and allow for customers commentary and feedback. 

An example of one of the brand promotion photos posted on the Dove Men+Care Facebook page

Some Facebook analytics: Though the number of likes are high, the number of people talking about Dove Men+Care dropped almost 4,200 people between February 2nd-23rd.

The photos, such as this one that was posted during the Oscars, are "on brand" and usually illicit some customer/employee conversation. For the most part, this is a good tactic.  Each of the photos has generated between 5- nearly 2,000 likes, 3-80 comments, and at least 1 or more shares between January 30th- February 26th.  WOW! However, the brand may run into some problems if the posts start getting too generic.  Perhaps Dove Men+Care could hold a Facebook based contest where users create a photo caption or give their favorite "dad moment" and somehow tying the products in.

Other conversations are started around questions, complaints, or wanting coupons for certain products.  The majority of the posts that direct a question at Dove Men+Care get a response that day. Complaints are addressed in a very professional and considerate manner, and positive remarks are met with a friendly thank you post.

 Question

 Negative feedback

Positive feedback

Twitter

the @DoveMenCare twitter home

Dove Men+Care has two different twitter handles: @MadeForMen and @DoveMenCare; the latter being the more active account. On that note, the twitter manager seems to tweet daily or every other day. Though this is somewhat good because it is not bombarding users with tons of tweets, perhaps Dove Men+Care could tweet twice daily, and more often during big sporting events or shows/events that customers would likely tune into.

The majority of tweets on the homepage are short quips that users can relate to and re-tweet ("RT"). One thing that I really like about this is how Dove Men+Care attempts to strike up a conversation online by asking users to RT with an answer to a question or a quip of their own.

According to IceRocket, many of the tweets coming from users are positive.  They include promotional tweets and positive feedback about products.

Icerocket

Analytic information according to Social Bakers

  

For Dove Men+Care, Twitter acts as a way to network and post whereas Facebook acts as a way to start conversation and promote the overall brand.

Webpage

The Dove Men+Care website is a place where customers can go to watch video testimonials of the brand ambassadors, view information and pictures of products, connect to the social media accounts, formally contact Dove Men+Care, watch featured commercials, and download coupons.

Though the website is visually very attractive, there is little content for users to read.  There is no information about the mission or story behind Dove Men+Care, no brand blog for users to check out, or customer ratings of products.  In conjunction, the website has not changed at all since the beginning of February. Two suggestions for the time being would be to, at some point, start a blog and create some background information about the company.  One way people are able to connect and become customers is by being able to relate to, believe in, and/or support the brand's roots. 

YouTube and Flickr

I personally love this short video featuring one of my favorite sports to watch, Rugby. They received 250,208 views as opposed to the 2012 super bowl commercial which received 109,981 views! 

This is one of the areas where Dove Men+Care could use some TLC (Flickr more so than YouTube).  Even though each of these accounts have some pictures and video clips/commercials, there are only a few.  I will note, in regards to Flickr, the company posts plenty of daily photos on the Facebook page. Perhaps if the people working behind the Facebook account could find a way to inspire users to post their own Dove Men+Care inspired photos on the page, they could do less with the Flickr account.  Until that time comes, the Flickr account should show a little more activity from the business end. Posting more short videos and pictures and then sharing them via twitter and Facebook may generate more views through those two platforms- Especially the YouTube clips!  Videos such as the one above have generated a lot of views... now all they need is some excitement and energy to accompany it!

Analytic Information

Demographics/ Target Audience

By using the Alexa web information tool, I was able to gather some demographic data for Dove Men+Care.  The most popular customers are men between the ages of 25-44... and not too surprisingly WOMEN 65+.  To me it is not extremely shocking that women are included in the demographic for a men's skin care brand.  First and foremost, Dove is known as a women's brand so it is understandable that women would take an interest in the men's sector... especially women who have male partners, husbands, brothers, sons, or friends that they think should use the products.

From the looks of the recent ad campaign, Facebook posts, and tweets the company is trying to appeal to the severely lacking 18-55 year old males.  It will be interesting to look at this a month, or even weeks from now to see if the recent Facebook posts and YouTube clips have shifted this demographic information.

Google Trends

According to the Google Trends graph above, there has been random dips and rises over the past month; the highest interest number being 100 and the lowest being 69.

Here, we can see which places purchase Dove Men+Care products.  I looked at the change over one month and noticed that the United States, India, and Australia were consistently the countries who supported Dove Men+Care the most.

Social Mention and Addictomatic

Results for February 12,2013... they since have NOT CHANGED when I last checked this evening!

When looking at the social media monitoring sites Social Mention and Addictomatic, I notice some of the brand weaknesses.  The above grab of the Social Mention profile shows that the brand has a little strength within the groundswell.  The 1% that is talking, however, is mostly neutral and positive information.  The fact that this information did NOT CHANGE over the span of a week was also a little shocking. 

Below are the results of a search on Addictomatic for Dove Men+Care social media activity over the past few weeks. To my surprise, there are many and varied social media sites, news sites, image areas, blogs, and feeds where there has been some mention of the Dove Men+Care brand.  After seeing the seemingly poor results from Addictomatic, I was impressed to see that the brand was being mentioned or talked about within other facets of the groundswell.  Seeing all of the places where Dove Men+Care was present made the 1% seem less terrible.