Positioning strategies of Nivea and Dove

by Hasmik Avetisyan · Published September 2, 2020 · Updated March 30, 2023

You have probably owned at least one product from Nivea or Dove. These are two renowned, strong, and influential companies in the beauty and cosmetics industry. Nivea and Dove have been in the market for decades and are quite experienced in what they do. They are mainly engaged in the production of personal care products, that are known for their high quality and affordability. The passion, dedication, and carefully chosen strategies and positioning made Nivea and Dove as successful as they are now. So, let’s explore both Nivea and Dove separately to understand how they came up with their positioning strategies.

Starting from Nivea let’s go through their segmentation strategy.

To understand which is the target audience of Nivea, let’s go through the following commercial of the company.

The commercial features several women with their children from around the world using legendary Nivea cream. All the scenes are warm, full of love, and connection. Undoubtedly, the family has a crucial place in life for these women. From their surroundings and appearance, they seem positive, caring, enthusiastic, and successful.

They enjoy their lives and feel remarkably happy besides their loved ones. These women represent the target market that Nivea focuses on. All the discussed details indicate that Nivea targets people who are known as Balancers.

Target Market: Balancer

Lifestyle and Values of the brand

Balancers have two priorities in life: their family and career. They always struggle to balance their time and attention among these two. These people understand the important role that family plays in every person’s life and they try to be by their loved ones as much as possible. Besides, Balancers have a deep understanding of the importance of a good career. Thus, they know how much work and effort is needed for success.

Attitude to Shopping:

People belonging to the Balancers target segment are remarkably loyal to the brands they initially tried and liked. They mostly value the quality of products thanks to the large disposable income that they usually own. Balancers never save on the items they desire or on their quality.

Despite this, representatives of this target segment are also deal hunters and will never pay for a product just because of the brand. They know what they want and buy, try new products only if they truly need them.

16 Personalities (what is for your business?)

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Marketing Strategy of Nivea

The marketing strategy of Nivea is remarkably consumer-driven. Nivea values its customers above everything. Consumers are a crucial part of their driving engine. This brand offers a wide range of diverse beauty and cosmetics products suitable for different ages, concerns, needs, and preferences. It seems like the brand takes into account every type of consumer and wants to offer something suitable to everyone. Every person will find something proper for him/herself in the production line of the company.

Nivea implements a mix of traditional methods of marketing together with unconventional ones. The brand uses Television and printed media quite often. It advertises its products and presents new launches through these media channels. Nivea TV ads are extremely popular, and you can probably recall seeing one.

At the same time, Nivea is highly active in different social media accounts such as Instagram. The brand uses these platforms to actively stay in touch with its customers, announce news, launches, events, and collaborations with daily posts.

The pricing strategy of Nivea is also quite important. This brand is known for its quality and affordability. Whenever buying products from Nivea people get value for their money. The production of the brand is easily accessible to the customers. The reason for this is that the production of Nivea is sold in major retail outlets as well as small retail stores all over the world.

Problem Removal

The main task for Nivea is caring and satisfying the needs of its consumers with high quality and affordable products. It wants to create an atmosphere of welfare for the environment, customers, and employees. The brand belongs to a company called Beiersdorf which is an influential and strong name in the beauty and cosmetics industry.

As a result, Nivea automatically has adopted 4 core values of the company, which are care, simplicity, courage, and trust. Nivea wants to make the customers and employees feel the main values of the company, easily associate the brand with them, and truly sense their presence through the performance of the brand.

Social Approval

There are different strategies that Nivea uses to obtain social acceptance. Nivea presents itself as a responsible and sustainable brand that cares about the well-being of our planet. The brand claims that it cares not only for its benefits, but for the environment, society, and consumer.

Nivea leads sustainable management in terms of the raw materials it uses, the formulas of the products, the production process, and packaging. At the same time, the production of the brand is cruelty-free, which means that none of the products are tested on animals.

Message Strategy

To understand the message strategy of Nivea, let’s discuss the following instagram post by the company.

The post picture depicts a warm scene of a family full of emotions and feelings. The company speaks about safety, trust, and care by linking those to the family. Nivea stands for the importance of family and with this post brings up the thoughts and feelings that we have connected to ours.

All these details indicate that Nivea has adopted the Caregiver brand archetype. This archetype stands for care, protection, and helping others. The motto of Caregivers is “Love your neighbor as yourself!” and the main idea of this archetype is carefulness.

It’s time to move on to Dove and its segmentation strategies.

Let’s watch and discuss the following commercial, to understand who Dove mainly wants to target.

The commercial features a group of diverse women from the Philippines. These women express themselves with their hair. They share negative situations from their lives which they overcame with faith and confidence. Each of them is remarkably unique, interesting, and beautiful on her own. All of them look energetic, confident, optimistic, and open. They are stylish and look trendy. After discussing all the details of the commercial it becomes clear that Dove focuses on the Chardonnay target segment.

Target Market: Chardonnays

Lifestyle and Values: Chardonnays are very energetic people who have an optimistic, positive, and practical outlook on everything in life. They are usually yes oriented, open, adventurous, and spontaneous in life and their decisions. These people are easily attracted to anything interesting, attractive, and new.

Their appearance and the way they look are of great importance to them. Chardonnays always try to be attractive, spend hours getting ready, and are usually very stylish and trendy. People belonging to the Chardonnays segment strive to keep up with time and give big importance to heritage and values. They value a good career, financial stability, and enjoy an active social life. Thus, these people often live in big cities, with active drive and life.

Attitude to Shopping: Shopping is some type of lifestyle for Chardonnays and they spend much of their spare time on it. They use shopping to care about their appearance. When shopping, these people tend to get attracted to new items and trends in the market to keep up with time and be stylish. Quality of products is the main priority that influences the buying decision of Chardonnays. These people will choose to spend more but be confident about the quality of the product they buy.

Marketing Strategy of Dove

When it comes to the marketing strategy of Dove Women are the main focus of the brand. All the production of the brand is aimed to help women care for themselves and feel beautiful. Throughout its history, Dove was standing for promoting its products using ordinary, real women instead of models. This has become a big strength for the brand.

Like Nivea, Dove uses a combination of unconventional and traditional marketing. The ads of the brand featuring real personages are quite popular on TV. At the same time, Dove is extremely active in different social media platforms.

The brand uses these platforms for promoting its products, communicating with its customers, and sharing news and updates. Also, Dove actively uses social media platforms for interesting partnerships. One such partnership was done in 2015 together with Twitter that was called #SpeakBeautiful campaign.

Dove uses competitive pricing. If compared, you can see that the production of this brand is priced slightly higher than others from the same category. The reason for the price is mainly the high quality of the products and their softening and moisturizing features.

Also, the products of Dove are sold in more than 80 countries. Thanks to the parent company Unilever, Dove has the chance to use Unilever’s distribution channels and make its products more accessible.