The well-known Dove soap brand has promoted a message of “real beauty” in its advertising and promotions for the past few years. This campaign has featured women of all skin tones and body shapes to highlight the societal need for increased acceptance, while also promoting the brand’s various personal hygiene products. According to Plastic News (Dove takes its ‘real beauty’ message to its bottles), the newest branch of this campaign involves blow molded bottles.
The “Real Beauty Bottles” campaign, as it was titled by creator Ogilvy London, features six different bottle designs that vary in shape, just like actual women’s bodies. The bottles range from a tall, skinny shape to a short, pear shape. This new push is aimed to truly emphasize the brand’s passion for body diversity by reflecting the beauty of all shapes in the products themselves.
Dove’s decision to incorporate custom bottle manufacturing into their advertising aligns with the overall, continued success of the plastics industry and more specifically, of blow molded plastic bottles. In fact, the plastics industry is the third-largest manufacturing industry in the United States today. Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles, like those produced in the Dove campaign, every hour.
The appeal of blow molding in making plastic bottles specifically has contributed to the overall rise in the custom bottle manufacturing realm. The modern plastic bottle manufacturer utilizes a standard blow molding machine, which consists of three main parts: the extruder, accumulator die and molds. The molds are where containers of different shapes, like Dove’s, are processed. Likewise, manufacturing companies have three industrial process options specific to blow molding: extrusion blow molding, injection blow molding and stretch blow molding.
But according to PR.com (North America PET Blow Moulder Market Revenue is Expected to Reach US$ 57.3 Mn by 2026), it’s not necessarily personal hygiene companies like Dove that are driving growth in this area. Rather, a new report suggests that the ever-growing food and beverage industry in the United States and Canada is responsible. As more and more carbonated and non-carbonated drinks are developed in North America, brands look increasingly more toward customized bottles to convey their unique designs and brand identity.
The machines required to make these, called PET blow molders, have thus become key industrial equipment in North America. The same study utilized future market insight to to project that the PET blow molder market in North America is expected to reach $57.3 million by the end of 2026. Overall, experts say the market will expand at a moderate pace. In other words, don’t expect the custom plastic bottle market to slow down anytime soon, whether it be incorporated in the food and beverage industry or for bottled soaps and toiletries, like in the case of Dove.
From the advertising campaign perspective, Dove has released a video announcing the launch of its new bottles and has received mixed reactions. Some criticize the bottles for too broadly simplifying the complex nature of women’s many shapes. Others have noted that the bottles’ unusual shapes don’t fit in their normal shower caddy. Still, others praise the company for their commercial use of the custom bottle manufacturing, citing the continued promotion of body acceptance.
The company has yet to announce in exactly which stores these new multi-shaped bottles will appear. The soap giant did, however, produce 6,800 of the bottles, which they distributed to 15 countries across the globe. Check your local drugstore or supermarket to select the bottle that you find most beautiful!
