I don’t understand why advertisers even bother to go there. Don’t they realize they risk alienating more Dove customers than gaining customers with their “tolerance”? Your job is to sell soap, not social change. Same thing with Audi and their soapbox driver ad. Why can’t they just sell their damned product and not force their liberal preaching on us?
Emotional association. "Buy this product and you'll feel better about yourself as a righteous person standing tall against bigotry." It's the sort of thing they resort to when "Buy this because it's a good product" isn't sufficient and sometimes isn't even true.
What it actually means is "We can manipulate you into buying this product because you're a gullible fool," but they get in trouble if they make that too obvious. FReepers of a certain age may recall the entire thing being beautifully satirized in the old Joe Isuzu ad campaigns. Here was a guy who was lying, everybody knew he was lying, they even printed "He's lying" on the bottom of the screen, and it was a successful campaign because everybody knew that the other commercials were lying just as hard.
The flip side to that is blowback, as in this case. But a lot of advertisers live in the same sort of rarified cultural air that Big Media do (well, they are Big Media to be accurate) and march on blissfully unaware that the cause they're flogging is not as popular as they've been led to believe. A good agency will focus group these things with sample wide enough to warn the customer that this is likely to happen, a cheap one (or one internal to the vendor because that's cheaper still) won't. Somebody kind ought to have taken the Dove management aside and informed them that boys in girls' dressing rooms isn't really something to try to hang the quarterly sales report on. (CoughcoughcoughTARGETcoughcough...)