Recent research suggests purpose marketing isn’t getting through to people, particularly Gen Z, as well as it once did. But that hasn’t been the case for Dove, according to the Unilever brand’s Global Chief Marketing Officer Alessandro Manfredi.

More than 18 years into the Campaign for Real Beauty, the brand still benefits from it, Manfredi said on the latest episode of the Marketer's Brief podcast. Purpose marketing, he added, “can be a fantastic accelerator, but needs to be done properly. And it’s not easy to do it properly.”

While Manfredi is fully embracing purpose, he keeps some things, such as artificial intelligence, at arm’s length, he said in this interview. “I’m hype allergic,” Manfredi said, adding that AI clearly does and will have a role in accelerating idea generation but won’t replace creative agencies. With a similar mindset, he said he kept Dove away from NFTs and limited its involvement with the metaverse to where it made the most sense for the brand—addressing the underrepresentation of female characters in gaming.

Three pillars of purpose

Manfredi sees three pillars to making purpose drive growth. “The first one is it needs to be linked to your business,” he said. “It needs to be linked to the products that you offer.”

In Dove’s case, he said, “we want to change beauty” by combating fake imagery across media, social media and advertising that lessens women’s self-esteem by setting up unrealistic comparisons. As part of the program, Dove has provided self-esteem education for 95 million girls, he said.

“The second point is it needs to be done authentically,” Manfredi said. “It cannot just be a campaign and then you don’t follow up with actions, and I think Gen Z is very smart and they see through your authenticity.”

The third pillar is media support, which Dove has provided consistently behind Campaign for Real Beauty. “Sometimes U.S. brands or companies do great work but nobody knows about it,” Manfredi said. “So investing in awareness of your purpose initiatives is also critical.”

Product and purpose overlap

While Dove does invest in purpose advertising, Manfredi hasn’t lost sight of the fact that meeting consumer needs through products and advertising those products is crucial. He budgets for purpose and product-focused advertising separately, but in many cases, the two overlap, as they did with a “Change Is Beautiful” campaign from Ogilvy and Wunderman that ran in the Super Bowl pregame in February behind the biggest restage in the history of Dove’s body wash brand.

“We have a lot of our budget spent in product communication,” he said. “But even in our product communication, we ensure that we shine to our purpose.” That includes a narrative against body shaming in the launch of the new Dove body wash collection, and launching a line of hair-care products aimed at amplifying, not taming, textures of natural hair.

“So even when we sell the products more directly,” he said, the marketing often includes “a narrative that I purposeful, that is actually trying to challenge the stereotypical view of beauty. And that’s what keeps the brand together.”