Dove‘s global chief marketing officer, Alessandro Manfredi, announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the soap’s parent company, Unilever, after two decades amid product backlash over numerous controversial marketing campaigns and new leadership seeking to improve competitiveness.
“Even the most beautiful love stories come to an end. A few months ago, I have decided to leave Unilever and the past few days were my last as the leader of the Dove brand. I am leaving with a deep feeling of Pride and Gratitude,” he wrote on LinkedIn, “I had the privilege to lead a brand that has become the #1 provider of body confidence education in the world.”
“I will always carry the torch of this humanity, wherever I go, whatever I do next,” he said.
Manfredi has been behind the soap company’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” which launched in 2004 to challenge digital distortions and unrealistic beauty standards in society at large.
His exit comes a year after Unilever’s CEO, Hein Schumacher, who took over leadership of the company in July 2023, claimed the company’s competitiveness was “disappointing” and the “overall performance” needed to improve.
The company has recently received backlash for various “woke” partnerships and marketing campaigns.
In 2022, Dove promoted Dove Dry Spray by doing a body positivity campaign and promoting a movement “rejecting negative armpit stereotypes.” On Instagram, Dove showed a plus-sized woman with hairy armpits who was embracing her “big pit energy.” On New York City billboards, the Dove campaign used the hashtag #freethepits.
In September 2023, Dove partnered with Black Lives Matter activist Zyahna Bryant to push a “fat liberation” campaign in the soap company’s “Campaign For Size Freedom.”
Bryant shared an Instagram video about her Dove partnership and said, “My belief is that we should be centering the voices and experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times. So when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, I think about centering the voices of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body.”
The campaign led to backlash and boycott threats.
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In February during the Super Bowl, the beauty product company ran a television advertisement that showed a montage of young girls playing sports but 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took aim at the company by bringing attention to its history of embracing transgender athletes as it went “out of its way to publicly celebrate men competing in women sports.”
Dove also had to apologize for a social media post in 2017 that showed a black woman removing her dark-colored shirt to reveal a white woman in a light-colored shirt. The company apologized for missing “the mark in representing women of color thoughtfully.”
