How Halo Top Fell Short on Creating a Community Conversation on Body Positivity
This summer, Halo Top released a commercial featuring a woman dancing alone in her underwear while eating ice cream unapologetically. The ad went viral, and the “Stop Shoulding Yourself” campaign brought a prominent topic to the forefront: body positivity.
The body positivity movement emerged around 2012, initially focused on challenging unrealistic beauty standards. As the movement grew, the message shifted from weight acceptance toward a message of “all bodies are beautiful.” The term has become so encompassing that it means something a little different dependent on who you ask. Overall the idea is that body positivity promotes:
· Appreciating your body
· Accepting flaws
· Loving yourself
· Confidence
· Accepting your body’s shape and size
Halo Top’s #StopShouldingYourself campaign used the hashtag to start a conversation with their audience about guilt-tripping themselves on what they “should” or “should not” be doing, such as eating ice cream. Halo Top is a low-calorie ice cream with the caloric intake for the entire carton bolded on the front of all their cartons, but this campaign encouraged its audience anyway to “indulge” in what brings them happiness to better their self-wellness and accept themselves. According to Halo Top, Stop Shoulding Yourself is intended to encourage people to rid themselves of destructive mindsets.
The media has long showed models that are very thin, in turn making society long for the same body type and look. Studies show that up to 40 percent of fashion models have eating disorders and as many as 50 percent of girls in 5–12th grade think that they’re not thin enough because of the images that they see in the media. This has resulted in a toxic “diet culture” that frowns upon those eating anything deemed “unhealthy.”
Halo Top took this background into account and used a “plus-size” model for their ad. Although it has over 18 million views on YouTube, it only received 2,000 likes and more than 14,000 dislikes. Though Halo Top tried to build an online community centered around the issue of body positivity through their campaign, they ended up creating a negative response.
This campaign’s failure is due to unclear messages. Halo Top rose in popularity not for the taste of their ice cream, but for the low-calorie count per carton. The brand emphasizes the number of calories over flavor and markets to people seeking health-conscious alternatives to traditional desserts. Their audience found it hypocritical of Halo Top to promote products related to dieting to a community that openly speaks out about the toxicity of the diet industry.
I think the campaign also fell short on fostering a “body empowerment” space. Halo Top only featured 3 posts for the entire campaign featuring what the idea of “should” meant to their influencers. This was a missed opportunity, as these creators actually spoke great on the topic, better than Halo Top did themselves. They wanted their audience to start a conversation and help the movement, yet didn’t create a space for this to happen. Instead, the brand focused on using their hashtag on random posts while also not showing any user-generated content to set an example for interaction.
Halo Top obviously realized their message wasn’t landing successfully, as in August, two months following the first ad, they released another ad with the same visuals and messages but new “should” phrases added to the original ones, though it was already too late. Instead of their key message coming off clear and positive, it rubbed the audience as condescending.
I believe Halo Top thought they were using social media to build an empowering community centered around a social issue, but their product image contradicted their intention behind the movement they were trying to speak on. I think their biggest success was using a model that was refreshing to see in the ad space, but their messaging and intentions were too unclear to land successfully with their audience.
