Dove: Real Beauty

Dove was a commodity soap brand owned by Unilever, fighting dozens of near-identical products in a category built on impossibly polished models. Then in 2004 a study found that only a tiny fraction of women worldwide called themselves beautiful, and the agency Ogilvy turned that finding into billboards of real women, public votes, and a 2006 short film that went viral before "going viral" was a playbook. People talked about a bar of soap like never before, and Dove held loyalty for decades without changing the product.

For founders and operators, this is the case about differentiating a commodity with a point of view, and the one word that decided whether it worked. A luxury brand making the same claim would have been laughed out of the room. It sharpens the decision of which industry convention you actually disagree with, and whether your brand has standing to say so.