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Dove Combines Comedy, Creators, and Community To Spark Social Conversation
Divya Raghavan, Senior Brand Director for Dove Innovation & Equity at Unilever, sees experiential marketing as a way to connect in-person engagement with social momentum.
Key Points
Experiential marketing is evolving beyond crowd size, with brands increasingly designing live activations to generate digital storytelling and sustained social conversation.
Divya Raghavan, Senior Brand Director for Dove Innovation & Equity at Unilever, leads the strategy behind the Sweaty Sisterhood campaign, using a live comedy event to normalize conversations around sweat while introducing a new antiperspirant innovation.
By pairing in-person experiences with creator-led social content, Dove transforms a single event into a broader cultural conversation designed to extend the campaign’s reach and relevance.
An in-person event that unlocks that experience and then carries that culture into social gives us stickiness, longevity, and authenticity.
Live events are no longer measured solely by the size of the crowd they attract. Increasingly, their value lies in the stories they generate once the audience goes home. As experiential marketing evolves, brands are designing real-world activations specifically to ignite broader digital conversations. Dove’s recent Pits and Giggles comedy show, part of its new Sweaty Sisterhood campaign, offers a clear example of this hybrid model where an in-person experience becomes the catalyst for ongoing social storytelling.
Leading the strategy is Divya Raghavan, Senior Brand Director for Dove Innovation & Equity at Unilever. A longtime Unilever executive who previously served as General Manager for the company’s Bath & Body segment, Raghavan now focuses on translating Dove’s brand purpose into culturally resonant marketing initiatives. For the Sweaty Sisterhood campaign, the objective was twofold: normalize the conversation around sweat while introducing Clinical + Care, Dove’s newest antiperspirant innovation. The solution was to meet the topic with humor. Partnering with comedian and self-described "sweaty sister" Hannah Berner, Pits and Giggles reframed an awkward subject as a shared experience designed to spark both community and online conversation.
"An in-person event that unlocks that experience and then carries that culture into social really gives us stickiness, longevity, and authenticity," says Raghavan. "Consumers do want this real-world connection with brands because it’s becoming more and more a part of their identity as opposed to a functional choice they are making. It feels more like a conversation with consumers as opposed to a one-way dialogue." Dove's latest strategy highlights how experiential marketing is evolving into a space where in-person engagement fuels the kind of authentic digital storytelling that traditional campaigns often struggle to generate.
Out of the shadows: The insight behind the campaign came from listening to where the conversation was already happening. Dove noticed that discussions about sweat were active online, but largely confined to private group chats and anonymous platforms. Rather than forcing a new narrative, the brand saw an opportunity to bring that existing conversation into the open and build a sense of community around it. "On platforms like Reddit, we've seen sparking conversations around sweat concerns and triggers like heat and hormones," Raghavan observes. "It's still sitting in the girl chat or anonymized platforms, and this was our way of bringing it out of the shadows and into the mainstream."
Guiding the conversation: The Pits and Giggles event also served as the starting point for Sweaty Girls Survival Guide, a social content series. Berner acts as a humorous guide through the topic, helping normalize experiences many people quietly deal with. The format reflects a broader industry shift toward using creators with authentic voices to lead conversations that feel personal rather than branded. "Hannah is such an authentic partner," Raghavan notes. "She's been so open sharing her "sweat fails" on Instagram, and she has such a loyal followership where women resonate and communicate with her."
The campaign's effectiveness came from connecting a lighthearted concept to unspoken human experiences. For Raghavan, the mission is personal. She sees the strategy as a way to address the real anxieties that often push women to hide aspects of their own biology, especially in professional environments. "I had a baby last year, and I was confused at a certain point whether I was hot flashing, perimenopausal, or pregnant," Raghavan shares. "Conversations related to hormonal sweat were never had before. You would never admit as a woman in the workplace to having a hot flash. To have that come into the mainstream is really empowering in terms of how conversations are shifting."
Measuring what matters: In the first week after launch, the brand looked beyond traditional metrics to understand the campaign’s early impact. The real indicator is the tone of the conversation unfolding across social platforms. Raghavan notes that early reactions suggest the campaign is creating the kind of connection Dove had hoped for. "Overall, the sentiment has been enormously positive. Even when Hannah put out the first post about launching this event, we were tracking the conversation. It made so many women feel seen and so excited that it was really enriching."
In many ways, the new campaign represents the next chapter in Dove’s long-running effort to reshape beauty conversations. The brand has spent more than twenty years challenging unrealistic standards and encouraging women to feel confident in their own skin. With Sweaty Sisterhood, that mission expands to address a topic that has largely remained outside the public conversation. "This is a continuation of our journey. We hope to sustain this conversation both through our innovation and communication campaigns," Raghavan concludes.
