This project looks at the personal care products company Dove and its #SpeakBeautiful campaign to encourage people to post “body positive” tweets on Twitter. Launched in 2015, this effort represents one of the few initiatives from a major corporation to address the problem of “body shaming” in social media. As a company, Dove has long been committed to promote positive body image acceptance for women.

Dove describes its company mission as helping people enjoy a positive relationship with their body image. The company’s efforts to achieve this mission include numerous campaigns such as “Real Beauty”, “Dove Selfie” and “Love Your Curls” campaigns. In addition, the Dove Self-Esteem Project is an education resource targeting young girls in an effort to raise self-esteem while lowering body dissatisfaction.

Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful project hopes to raise awareness about how online dialogue can often contribute to negative mindsets toward beauty. Dove customers and others are encouraged to post “body-positive” tweets with the #SpeakBeautiful hashtag. More than 10.5 million tweets have posted since the program launched.

In this project, the researchers will conduct a qualitative content analysis of a random sample of #SpeakBeautiful tweets. Themes from tweets will be categorized looking at participants’ stated perceptions about body image. This analysis can then be compared to the company’s previous efforts to promote body image acceptance as part of a corporate public relations and cause-marketing strategy. Theoretical context will be drawn from Grunig’s theory of two-way symmetrical communications, which posits that an organization should seek for meaningful, two-way dialogue with its stakeholders so that the organization and its audience arrive at a “win-win” zone. These corporate-led efforts to promote body acceptance rather than body dissatisfaction could have beneficial implications for both companies and their stakeholders.