With the launch of #LoveYourCurls at the start of 2015, Dove Hair shined a light on an underrepresented problem: Women and girls with curly hair often feel less confident than their straight-haired counterparts. Dove Hair then ignited a social dialogue to celebrate curls. Women took to social media en masse, sharing their journeys to curl love, and sparking a change in sentiment towards curls and the Dove Hair brand.
However, one area of everyday communication remained unchanged, leaving a gap in self-expression for curly women and girls. Over 74% of people use emoji daily, but not a single emoji depicting a woman with curly hair existed. Unrepresented within the existing emoji set, Dove Hair created the custom Dove Hair Love Your Curls Emoji Keyboard to empower women to fully express their curl love, and further the social mission of building self-esteem and curl confidence. Curly-haired women shared their #LoveYourCurls stories on Twitter during the initial launch of the campaign, and Dove Hair returned to the platform to launch the Love Your Curls Emojis Keyboard. To spark the conversation, a custom hashflag emoji auto-populated when the #LoveYourCurls hashtag was used. Along with the hashflag, we launched an uplifting campaign with creative designed to drive our key objectives: use of the hashflag, downloads of the new emoji keyboard, and driving brand equity through association with the #LoveYourCurls mission.
The custom Dove Hair Love Your Curls emoji keyboard, featuring a diverse range of curly hair types, colors, and skin tones, was the first step to ensuring curly-haired women and girls continue to feel represented. Building a custom emoji wasn't enough, though. We brought the keyboard to a place where curly-haired women were already using existing emoji–Twitter. Twitter was a vital part of the initial phase of the #LoveYourCurls campaign, helping to generate a groundswell of positive conversation and curl love story-sharing, so it was a natural place to drive awareness and downloads of the new keyboard.
At launch, we partnered with Twitter to develop a custom emoji to populate alongside our #LoveYourCurls hashtag. In order to ensure the Twitter hashflag and custom emoji reached as many women as possible, a #LoveYourCurls Promoted Trend ran when the keyboard launched in the App Store and in Google Play. To ensure we hit on multiple campaign objectives, we developed creative for a 12-week campaign tailored to a messaging cadence to drive our goals:
●Awareness of the Twitter hashflag
●Awareness of the keyboard
●Downloads of the keyboard
●Drive brand equity
In addition to crafting specific messaging by objective, we also tailored unique communication to our key audiences - general market, African-American, and Hispanic women, using the diverse range of our new emoji within creative.
In-market performance was analyzed weekly and creative was developed on a rolling basis so that learnings were taken into account to drive engagement week-over-week.
Additional assets were made to ensure relevancy to the curly-haired community and emoji lovers alike, including custom creative to celebrate women in culture who were openly embracing their curly locks or sharing excitement when an emoji was named the 2015 word of the year.
Keyboard downloads exceeded goals by 400% with over 905,000 Dove Love Your Hair Emoji Keyboard installs, making this one of the top-performing standalone emoji keyboards of all time. While the download number speaks for itself, the positive impact that Dove Hair was able to leave on women and girls was truly inspiring. With the launch of the keyboard, women continued the #LoveYourCurls mission by sharing their stories and selfies, tagging their friends in Tweets to encourage downloading the keyboard, and showing us how they used the emoji with friends. The curly-haired community continues to express their appreciation that Dove Hair has finally addressed their underrepresentation and has given them a way to accurately express themselves. Now, in more ways than ever, women can truly show what it means to #LoveYourCurls.
