With its reputation for being a source of transparent, authentic and real opinions, Reddit has become a go-to platform for consumers looking for honest product reviews. With 116 million active users and over 100,000 communities, many brands have tried to engage with users, to varying degrees of success. That’s because the nature of the platform can be difficult to navigate, as the open-conversation format can see brands losing control of the conversation rather quickly.
Unilever’s Dove brand recently took a unique approach to these challenges by gathering the first 50 Reddit reviews of its Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Mask, regardless of sentiment, and turning them into its “r/eal reviews” campaign. Building on Dove’s “Real Beauty” brand platform, the effort rolled out across multiple channels, along with an in-person activation, in early February.
Marketing Dive sat down with Emily Barfoot, head of Dove U.S., to discuss how the campaign came together, how the brand navigates Reddit and what role the platform plays in the brand’s overall social strategy.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: What was the idea behind Dove’s recent Reddit campaign?
EMILY BARFOOT: We relaunched our hair care portfolio last year and that meant new packaging, formulations, claims, pricing proposition — the whole works. As part of that, we launched a 10-in-1 serum mask that became, ultimately, the most awarded mask of last year in the U.S. So when we were seeing how social media communities were picking up on the relaunch, one of the things that we saw is there was actually an emerging conversation organically within Reddit of people who were navigating their own damaged hair and wanted to find other people's opinions on what was the best solutions out there.
We saw some quite hilarious commentary, positive, negative, about the mask. Reddit is this amazing, honest and transparent platform. Consumers view it as one of the sources of true honesty left on the internet. We've always been about what real people say in our campaigns. So we thought, why not leverage an existing conversation within this platform and bring it to the world as a new way to show how confident we are in our products, that we're willing to just put it in the hands of Redditors.
How did the campaign come together?
We did a post toward the end of last year that basically said, “Hey, Redditors, we need you. We want you to review our most-awarded mask from 2025 and we will publish the first reviews that give us the permission to do so, no matter what you say.” And the best was that not only did we see hundreds of comments flow in, some of the best comments beyond the ones that gave us really tangible feedback on the product — which is great — were the ones that said things like, “Did Dove, seriously just leave the comments open. Is this real?” And so we knew we had something special when that came through.
Redditors can have a negative reaction to brands on the platform. How did Dove navigate that?
I think that was part of the risk of the campaign, right? We took a shot because we had a lot of confidence in the product itself. We're not going to please everyone, but we will hopefully please a majority of people. The Redditor community is not brutal for the sake of being brutal. They're just honest. We really wanted to rely on that honesty. It commands a degree of honesty from brands. It pushed us to show up in the way that Redditors want to be spoken to within that environment. The insights we've seen on Reddit have been actually very balanced and very fair.
Is Reddit part of your long-term social strategy?
While I can't say specific details around how we will continue to engage, I can say that Reddit will continue to be a critical part of the way we go to market, as well as many of our other platforms.
What's special about Reddit is not only is the realness a very good affinity to the Dove brand, but it's also an incredible source of innovation insights. They're giving us ideas all the time with things that we could innovate in, things that we could expand on within the range. We'll pay attention to that strategically going forward as well.
We also are finding it's an incredible search tool. So some of our evidence has shown 71% of Redditors are searching for that brand within the platform in order to inform that purchase decision… When people are trying something new, they're going to go to platforms like Reddit, they're going to search there and we need to be there as a result.
And lastly, Reddit is becoming a big feeder for large language models. As people are using those tools, if that's going to be feeding them recommendations, we want to be in the places that are providing the longer-term influence. We will continue to explore the partnership with Reddit.
Why does Dove routinely turn to social media channels? What benefit are you finding there?
I would just say that Dove, from a media and marketing strategy, leverages the full ecosystem. Social-first is a mantra of growth that we and Unilever are taking that is rooted in ensuring we are looking at communities and elevating what we call many-to-many, instead of one-to-many as a strategy. That means putting our products and our voice into the hands of creators and influencers out in the community, and that’s important for a few reasons. Number one, the way people are showing up for one another on a regular basis is through communities, through shared interests and often that is coming from a social environment. Number two, the fastest, most immediate insights that we can get are within the social world, both in terms of how we can show up as a brand, but then also in terms of what people need.
Dove has stuck with the “Real Beauty” brand platform since 2004. What is making you stick with it over two decades later?
Dove is one of the first brands to really introduce and disrupt the beauty industry with the idea of “Real Beauty,” and so it became a very differentiating factor for the brand right from the start. There will always be threats on what realness means in the world, and so as a brand standing for that, there's still so much more to do and so much more we want to do.
I would also say it's deeply connected to our products and our product philosophy. We've been able to connect our products, our product goals to our brand to make sure that we're always delivering superior products that make you feel you can be your natural self and be real beauty at its core.
There really has been that tight connection between product and brand ambition and cultural need that has not changed. It just evolves.
