By ELIZABETH OLSON



Dove is trying to rekindle customer interest in its four-year-old “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which shows images, including curvy women in white underwear, that have sometimes eclipsed the charitable cause that underpins it. 

And that, some critics say, is the problem: Unilever, which manufactures the Dove brand of soaps, shampoos and body lotions, uses the campaign to raise money for a fund that promotes healthy body images to young girls, but the effort is faltering because consumers do not connect its products to the cause.

So Dove is changing course. Last week, it introduced a television spot that directly links the purchase of Dove products to financial support for the Dove Self-Esteem Fund. The 30-second commercial, “Under Pressure,” shows a girl bombarded with unrealistic images of skinny models and closes with the line: “And you support our efforts every time you buy Dove.” (To clear up any lingering confusion, the ad, created by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, also shows a Dove moisturizing soap bar.)

The ad may not be enough to silence critics. Dove says that it does not designate a dollar amount or percentage of product sales for its Real Beauty campaign, but it said it had spent more than $10 million on the Self-Esteem Fund, which also takes donations from the public. By comparison, the Dove brand brought in sales of more than $2.5 billion last year, outselling competitors like Ivory from Procter & Gamble.

Kathrine E. O’Brien, United States marketing director for Dove, said that the Self-Esteem Fund will spend $1.5 million to $2 million this year. The goal is to reach five million girls by 2010, and so far the number stands at two million, she said. Most of the outreach is done through a collaboration with the Girl Scouts, which offers a program to help girls counter idealized beauty images.

The campaign has “spent a lot of time debunking stereotypes, and now it’s time to let people know what we’ve been doing to build self-esteem,” Ms. O’Brien said.

While Dove’s ads have been widely praised for drawing attention to unrealistic beauty images, they also have been widely mocked, which is in part a testament to their success. Aside from the standard YouTube parodies, there was a campaign by Greenpeace that superimposed four orangutans on a Dove tableau — not to protest negative images of women, but to argue that Unilever was destroying orangutan habitats in its quest for palm oil.

Dove says it is taking a cue from its critics. “The earlier ads were all about exposing the problem, but starting last year we started to hear from women that ‘we get it, but tell us more about what you actually are doing,’ ” said Janet D. Kestin, co-chief creative officer at Ogilvy Toronto, who helped create the spot.

“The soap bar is the emblem of the brand, so people now understand: ‘If I buy that, then I’m doing something,’ ” Ms. Kestin said.