The Marketer Redefining Dove for the Creator Age

In a world of brands attempting to convey authenticity across their communications, Dove has long been a global leader. Under chief growth marketing officer Marcela Melero, that remains the case as the creator economy grows, offering a new route for consumer engagement with trusted product messaging.

That’s been Unilever’s marketing focus for more than a year since CEO Fernando Fernandez announced the world of influencers as being the space that at least half of the household brands conglomerate would focus on. Melero sees creator partnerships as a natural evolution of Dove’s Real Voices platform as it pledges to maintain true representations of women’s bodies across its marketing.

That strategy was updated by Unilever’s global chief marketing officer Leandro Barreto who at Cannes Lions spoke about his desire to see its portfolio of brands convey stories that communities choose to share, following Dove’s long established lead.

The first truly creator-led campaign for the brand was released in London in April 2025, #ShareTheFirst. Created by Edelman, the OOH initiative featured unfiltered stories that based on the insight that nine in ten women take up to 50 photos before posting one.

“Dove has always started with real voices at the heart of the brand. In the early days it was real women and testimonials, people you trust, using the products for real and telling you what they think. In a way, creators are an evolution of that. You could argue the real women in testimonials were the creators of today. So for us it was always very natural – it’s something we love,” she explains.

For Dove, creators aren’t a transactional media channel but long‑term collaborators who share the brand’s values and understand their communities deeply. It has since produced campaigns like the collaboration with Netflix series Bridgerton to show how creators elevate ideas with authenticity and speed.

For Dove, the shift isn’t just about investing in creators — it’s redefining how the brand works with them to build real beauty conversations, and the marketer leading that is long accustomed the Unilever’s ways to deliver those aims.

An early career pivot

Melero has been with the company for nearly a quarter of a century, joining as a regional brand manager for Dove after graduating with a degree in food engineering in her native Argentina. Because of that she expected to join the Foods Research and Development team which was based in Brazil where she had relocated to for work.

Her workmates recognised her aptitude for marketing as she was often explaining the technology while talking in an approachable manner for consumers on how to package and simplify a product, its innovation, and the science in a simple way.

“As marketers, we need to take complex things and make them simple. Simplicity still wins,” she states.

And while the majority of her career has focused on Dove (including a move to New York in 2005 where she still resides) there was also a two-year stint as the global brand vice president of Vaseline.

“I have always been curious. I love design, trends, and popular culture, and I’m fascinated by people and what shapes the way they think and behave. I’m the person who will start a conversation with a taxi driver and want to hear their whole life story. That curiosity turned out to be a real strength in marketing,” she adds. “Other people saw the potential in me before I fully saw it in myself. I learned by doing, observing and staying open. I have never regretted studying engineering, because it taught me how to connect dots, find patterns and turn complexity into simplicity. Those skills have shaped the way I approach marketing ever since.”

World Cup glory

With one of the most significant global cultural events taking place across America, Canada, and Mexico this summer with the FIFA World Cup partnership, there was little surprise to see several of Unilever’s brands turn up in force. That was an opportunity for each to amplify their own voices, not least Dove with its message of body confidence through it’s the Game Is Ours campaign its #KeepHerConfident platform.

The campaign was led by athletes and sports officials including Tori Penso, @MiaHamm, @AlyssaThompson, Ilona Maher, @Hilary Knight, @OliviaSmith and @Desiree Scott, who used their platforms to help turn the attention towards girls and the barriers they face in sport throughout the tournament. The campaign pushes back on the insight that that 1 in 2 girls who quit sports are criticized for their body type, aiming to use the world’s biggest sports stage to cheer for girls and show that their joy is louder than the criticism.

The focus on sound aims to capture the real sounds of girls enjoying the sports they and use those sounds to celebrate everything sport gives them.

“For me, this is about showing up only as Dove could. We can show up at a major men’s sporting moment and still remain true to who we are, using the scale of the tournament to put girls’ confidence, participation and joy at the centre,” says Melero.

To maximise the moment and the social presence of the partners involved in the campaign, Dove created The Locker Room, a 24/7 social‑listening hub launched ahead of the World Cup to track real‑time cultural moments across global fandom. It helps the team spot sparks that travel fast, like the Viking Row, which grew from a Norwegian celebration into a defining social moment.

But Merelo says that this wasn’t just about trend‑spotting — it was about recognising people whose stories reflect Dove’s values. For example, when Tori Penso became the first American woman to referee a men’s World Cup match, Dove quickly partnered with her, celebrating the milestone in meaningful ways. The Locker Room is able to guide Dove in identifying where culture is moving and when the brand has a genuine role to play.

It’s another example of how the brand is embracing creator culture to take the lead in its communications, measuring success across how they build trust, relevant, difference and equity over time. But for Merelo, creating brand differentiation is key for both long and short term when it comes to creator partnerships.

“It's all about how we continue to build meaning, strengthen brand equity, and show up in a way that feels distinctive,” she adds. “For Dove, creators are a natural evolution of something that has always been at the heart of the brand: real voices and real experiences. In the early days, that meant real women sharing honest testimonials about products they genuinely used. Today, creators play that role within their own communities. They understand their audiences deeply, they know how culture is moving, and they can help us make an idea feel more relevant and human.”

The world of marketing according to Marcela Melero

What work are you most proud of?

I’m a mum of three daughters, and I know I can never pick a favourite. If I had to pick one thing I’m proudest of, it’s how Dove sticks consistently to beauty as a source of happiness and not anxiety, and how we bring that to life in different ways.

I shared the World Cup example — what does that purpose have to do with a men’s football World Cup? One in two girls quits sports because of body criticism, and our campaign, The Game Is Ours, uses the men’s tournament to cheer for girls and make their joy louder.

We consider ourselves ‘norm defiers’. Bridgerton is a norm defier. We collaborated to show the spectacle of real beauty. I’m very proud of that work, and of how the purpose comes to life through culture. I love Dove r/eal Reviews — taking real reviews, unedited Reddit reviews of Dove 10-in-1 Repair Masks, positive and negative and having the courage to own that. I’m very proud of all of it.

Is there work you haven’t been involved in that made you jealous it was so good?

The KitKat Heist. I believe one of our biggest responsibilities as CMOs is to take risks, because I believe the biggest risk is not taking any at all. That could have been a crisis management moment, and it fell into their lap at Easter — it couldn’t have been better. It was like a Christmas gift! They opened it and made an amazing campaign out of it. I’m very jealous of that. I keep thinking how I would have handled that surprise — no chocolate for Easter — and how to move with those agile moments.

What I admire is not only the speed, but the discipline. The best agile work does not just react to culture; it builds a world around a moment while staying true to the brand.

In the past, agility might have been answering a post on the feed. Now you can build whole universes out of agility. That’s what I’m eager to do more of.

We had an agility moment ourselves when Tori Penso was selected to referee a men’s FIFA World Cup match. Our team saw it through social listening, reached out and built a partnership - amazing. She's now an ambassador for Dove and the sports work. We branded her cleats with her daughters' names; she has a Dove whistle she uses throughout the tournament. That was an agile moment. Those are the ones I want more of - not just smart posts, but building these universes.

What excites me about agility is how a single moment can create an entire universe, whether that moment is real or not. The KitKat Heist was real, but it became larger than life. That excites me. And we’re obsessed with real women and real insights. The proximity we can get now, the amount of data and social listening, really knowing what communities want and talk about — that excites me too.

What would be your advice for other marketers trying to write a successful brief?

It is not easy at all. Even in this age of fragmentation, a brief should still be simple.

Many times, we start adding this and that, but simplicity is still the key. We always used to say that the one-liner should be no more than five lines, something you could put on a business card. That still holds.

What has changed is that we need to be very clear upfront about which fandoms or communities we are going to be obsessed with for that brief.

It is not just about what the brand wants to say. We need to understand what is happening within those specific communities and how the brand can show up in a way that will carry and travel, rather than forcing itself into the conversation

Beauty Never Gets Old is a good example. We realised that women over 60, the Forever Beauties, were having a huge conversation about feeling invisible in beauty. They were also long-time users of the Dove Beauty Bar.

Instead of simply repeating “Dove with one-quarter moisturising cream”, which they already knew, we listened to what they were saying. They wanted to be seen.

So we created a campaign that celebrated women over 60 and gave visibility to something the category often overlooks.

What frustrates you most as a marketer?

I think there's an obsession with attention and volume, putting more, more, more out there for visibility. But the real deal is relevance. You can cut through and get attention, but today it's the hardest thing to earn and the easiest thing to lose. For me, we need to focus more on relevance and being meaningful, not just the volume of content we put out into the world.