If Woke Means Broke, Why Did So Many Brands Do It? The Real Reason Marketing Campaigns Fail

Kristina Durante and her fellow researchers didn’t set out to dismantle decades of advertising wisdom. But when a soap ad featuring bare-faced women of all shapes and sizes doubled Dove's sales, the social psychologist had questions.

"At the time," she recalls, "my friend and now collaborator, Dr. Sarah Hill, and I thought the campaign was doomed to fail. Then the data came rolling in. The Campaign for Real Beauty increased Dove soap sales from $2 billion to $4 billion in three years. That opened a really interesting research question: why was this campaign successful?"

Durante, a professor at Rutgers Business School, has spent years exploring what happens when women see themselves, not a fantasy version of themselves, reflected in advertising. Her latest research, co-authored with Amelia Singh, Aziza C. Jones, and Sarah E. Hill, asks a deceptively simple question: When and why does beauty fail to sell products?

The answer? It depends on what you're selling, and who you're selling it to.

A Tale of Two Campaigns

The seeds of research were planted nearly two decades ago, when two brands took radically different paths in how they sold beauty to women, and reaped very different results.

In 2004, Dove launched its now-infamous Campaign for Real Beauty, a departure from traditional advertising. Instead of featuring airbrushed supermodels, Dove showcased women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and ethnicities, all makeup-free, smiling, and often shown in their underwear. It was a gamble in an industry built on idealized beauty, but it worked.

Fast forward to 2021, and Victoria’s Secret, once synonymous with supermodel glamour, attempted a similar pivot. Gone were the legendary Angels, replaced with a mix of plus-size, disabled, and transgender models to modernize the brand’s image. While the campaign drew headlines and applause on social media, the financial outcome was starkly different.

"Victoria's Secret experienced a notable revenue drop. By 2023, sales had fallen by 8%," Durante explains. "It was perceived as less authentic and more like the brand was jumping on a bandwagon."

Why did Dove soar while Victoria’s Secret stumbled? Durante believes the answer lies in how each brand’s identity aligned, or didn’t, with its messaging. Dove had long positioned itself as a down-to-earth, wellness-driven brand. Victoria’s Secret, on the other hand, had spent decades selling sex appeal and exclusivity.

Many legacy brands make a similar mistake. They try to recreate the success of others without honoring what made their image aspirational in the first place. Brands like Glossier succeeded because they were authentic. Their minimalist, fresh-faced identity grew out of "Into the Gloss" and resonated with millennial women in a way that felt personal. But when every beauty exec in Los Angeles began saying, "Make it more like Glossier," most imitators failed.

The same goes for brands like Skims, which balance inclusivity with aspiration. Kim Kardashian is not just the founder but the fantasy. The brand’s success doesn’t come from using diverse models alone. It comes from anchoring those decisions in a strong, recognizable identity that consumers admire and want to emulate.

The Dove Effect Was Real, But It Wasn’t What We Thought

"We wondered if the increase in sales wasn’t about Dove’s soap being a better product, but rather that this campaign did something no other ad campaign had done before and put a diverse range of women in a highly visible major marketing campaign that canvased television and billboards. In other words, we thought women were donating to a social movement more so than seeing new product benefits that were not there before."

In early experiments replicating the Dove effect, Durante found that women preferred a product advertised by a nontraditional model of average attractiveness, compared to a traditional model of high attractiveness, when the product was soap. However, when the product was mascara, the effect reversed.

"When the product was mascara, women were more likely to purchase the product when the ad featured a traditional model," she explains. That contrast led to the central insight of her study.

Private vs. Public Products—Why It Matters

"In marketing research, a private product is a product that cannot be used to signal status or to enhance how people perceive you," Durante explains. "In contrast, a public product is visible, other people will see it, and consumers use publicly visible products to signal something about their identity. Public products are typically aspirational, like clothing, whereas private products are more functional, like towels or detergent."

This product visibility turned out to be a powerful moderator. In one of the study's experiments, 264 women viewed an ad featuring either a traditionally attractive or an average-looking model for a private or public product. The results were statistically significant: average-looking models increased women’s likelihood of buying a private product. Attractive models increased women’s likelihood of buying public products.

This distinction is why campaigns that celebrate beauty continue to resonate when the product itself is part of the fantasy. Women still admire glamour, especially when it’s done well. But it needs to make sense for the brand. That’s why Skims or Charlotte Tilbury, brands that embrace glamour unapologetically, remain fan favorites, while others that awkwardly abandon their image in the name of "relatability" often lose ground.

What Beauty Means in This Study

When Durante and her colleagues talk about beauty, they’re talking about what actual consumers perceive as average versus idealized attractiveness. To test their hypotheses, the researchers needed a way to distinguish between traditionally attractive models and those who looked more like everyday women. So, they did what any good social scientist does: they measured it.

In each of the experiments, the team used photographs of female and male models that had been pre-rated for attractiveness on a 7-point scale by independent evaluators. These evaluations helped categorize the models into two distinct groups:

Traditionally Attractive Models

These were the high-glamour faces you might expect in fashion campaigns: youthful, symmetrical, photogenic, and professionally styled. They consistently scored on the higher end of the scale, with ratings of 6 or 7 out of 7. These models were used to represent what the beauty industry has long defined as aspirational.

Average-Looking Models

These were women and men who looked like someone you might run into at the grocery store, unretouched, modestly styled, and without professional makeup or lighting. These models weren’t unattractive, but they weren’t elevated to the kind of perfection consumers are used to seeing in ads. They typically scored between 3 and 5 on the scale, solidly “average” by cultural standards.

This contrast allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of perceived beauty without confounding it with other elements like race, age, or body size. The key question was: When do people want to see beauty, and when do they prefer something more "average"?

And as the data revealed, it’s not about one being better than the other, it’s about context. Women tend to respond more positively to average-looking women when they’re thinking about products used in their private lives. But when it comes to public-facing items, the traditional beauty ideal still has cultural power.

Women Are Changing the Game

"We found that women respond more positively to average-looking models for personal-use items, but there's an important exception. It only applies when the product does not enhance beauty. Soap gets you clean, which is more functional than aspirational."

She continues: "If the Dove effect is not about product quality perceptions per se, and more about rewarding a campaign that showcases average-looking women on billboards, increasing the public’s exposure to women of diverse beauty, then nontraditional models should increase sales. We reasoned that the effect would be stronger for products that are not associated with enhancing status or beauty."

That distinction held up in multiple experiments. In another study of 600 participants, researchers found a significant three-way interaction for ad effectiveness. "Men consistently preferred attractive models, regardless of product type," Durante notes. "Women preferred average-looking models for private products but attractive models for public ones, a pattern that extended to product quality perceptions."

And it doesn't stop there: "A serial mediation effect emerged for women, where product type influenced purchase intention through ad effectiveness and quality perceptions."

"Across human history, women’s social value was heavily influenced by their beauty, which is a signal of health and fertility," Durante added. "Women’s attractiveness was and still is rewarded. Men are valued more for their social status and wealth."

"Since advertising is highly visible, it is also a way to change the social narrative whereby ads featuring women of diverse beauty can help lower the beauty expectations for women, making them more realistic."

So, does she think men will ever care about diverse representation in advertising the way women do?

"If the diverse representation had to do with something that men compete on to attract mates, like status. It's possible that men’s response would change by context if there was a campaign they could support that would lower the bar on expectations of how much status a man needs to have or how much money a man needs to make to attract women."

Performative? Maybe. Powerful? Absolutely.

"All ads are performative," Durante says. "All efforts to establish and solidify a particular brand identity are performative. Marketing is about moving the bottom line. This has been the case since the dawn of commerce." Still, she sees value in broadening representation.

"Seeing ads with a diverse range of spokespeople is a good thing, in my mind. It’s a psychological balm, seeing that people are not perfect all the time. And, as we have seen, this can really resonate strongly if done right."

Her data backs that up, too. In one study, women were more likely to select the average-looking model for a billboard promoting a private product than a public one. The effect was strongest among those who reported a desire to normalize lower beauty standards.

"We are desperate for any way we can feel seen and valued, and that includes responding more positively to efforts to normalize not being perfect all the time."

Some critics argue that appealing to relatability over beauty is another form of pandering, or worse, that it undermines aspiration altogether. But Durante’s data suggests representation, done thoughtfully, can enhance both emotional well-being and the bottom line.

Perhaps the real problem is simply an oversaturation of relatable content that has many women longing for a return to more glamour and fantasy in the images they see.

AI, Filters, and the Fight for Realism

That’s because ads don’t just sell products, they quietly shape our sense of self. "Self-concept is how we see ourselves. And we tend to be really hard on ourselves," she explains. "No one is perfect in every area of life, yet we see only snippets of other people’s lives in ads and social media, and these are often curated to reflect perfection. This has a profoundly negative effect on self-esteem."

Against that backdrop, seeing women without makeup or filters isn’t just refreshing, it’s restorative. "From a consumer well-being perspective, I think seeing women without makeup or airbrushing is a good thing." But what happens when the beauty you see isn’t real at all?

As AI-generated influencers, virtual models, and hyper-edited content flood our feeds, Durante believes a line needs to be drawn. "I do agree with the disclosure policy on whether the ad is AI-generated or not. Beyond this, it might be unrealistic. All ads are edited, airbrushed, etc."

In other words, we may not be able to stop the perfection, but we can label it. And for a generation of women caught between filters and reality, even that small gesture could make a difference.

The Takeaway for Brands

"Any brand needs to carefully consider what kind of benefits their product provides to consumers," Durante concludes. "Is it aspirational, is it wellness, is it warm, is it functional, is it status signaling? How established is the current brand identity? Do you risk alienating loyal consumers you already have?" Rather than swinging the pendulum strongly in one direction or the other, it may be best to find a good middle ground or dip your toe slowly into a new direction before you go all in."

The most successful brands today find that balance. They neither abandon beauty altogether nor pander with forced inclusivity. They root their campaigns in a clear identity and remain consistent with the emotional experience their audience wants, whether that’s to feel seen or be inspired.

As consumer expectations evolve, the lesson is clear: beauty still sells, it just needs the right context.