Articles about Social Issues

 25 JAN 2017
 
 HBS CASE

How Should Advertisers

Respond to Consumer
Demand for Whiter Skin?
 
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Skin-lightening creams are a fast-growing market in India. Rohit
Deshpandéexplores what firms should do when a product is decidedly popular
—but may be promoting discrimination.
 
 
by Dina Gerdeman
In India, where many people consider fair skin more desirable than dark, the
cosmetics industry has responded by producing a wide range of skin-
lightening products—and with great success.

But, when these companies pitch their creams in ads that seem to portray fair-
skinned people as somehow superior to those with darker skin colors, are
marketers crossing a line?

Cream makers say they are merely meeting a market need, but social activists
argue that these companies have an ethical responsibility to avoid marketing
products in a way that could perpetuate a skin color bias.

Where does a company’s obligation lie?

The struggle over the advertising of India’s fairness creams is the centerpiece
of a March 2016 case “Fair & Lovely vs. Dark Is Beautiful,”which was written
by Rohit Deshpandé, Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Harvard
Business School, and researcher Saloni Chaturvedi of the School’s India
Research Center.
“These products have really grown in the last 15 to 20 years, and I was
interested in looking at how they have been marketed,” says Deshpandé, who
says the case generated a lively debate among business leaders in his
Executive Education course. “If you think of the role of advertising as providing
primes that are psychological in nature as a means of persuasion, you can
take something that exists in society—a consumer preference for fair skin—
and leverage it for good or for bad.”

Advertisements under fire

As Deshpandé and Chaturvedi detail in the case, lighter-skinned women have
been favored in India’s ads. Advertisements in the 1980s told stories of dark-
skinned women unable to find husbands until they applied fairness creams.
Later, skin lightening brand Fair & Lovely linked lighter skin with success,
including a TV commercial showing a young woman able to secure a job as a
sports broadcaster only after applying the product. And several famous actors
have endorsed skin-whitening products.

Although men share this desire for fair skin and sometimes dip into similar
creams marketed to men (or use their wives’ products), the case explains, the
prejudice seems to have a deeper impact on women, whose worth is more
often judged by society on their appearance. (This is obvious from matrimonial
ads that seek brides who are “fair and beautiful.”)

Founders of Women of Worth (WOW), a nonprofit organization established in

2008 to promote women empowerment, decided to take on the issue by
launching a “Dark Is Beautiful” campaign, partly to pressure advertisers to
stop portraying lighter-skinned people as superior.

“IF YOU LOOK AT WHETHER IT’S DONE ANYTHING TO

AFFECT THE SALES OF THE PRODUCT CATEGORY,
THE ANSWER IS NO”
Actor and director Nandita Das became its unofficial brand ambassador,
speaking out against skin color discrimination (or “colorism”) and refusing to
be air brushed or lightened for her film roles. The campaign was designed to
get attention, and that it did. A picture of Das—accompanied by her quote,
“Stay unfair. Stay beautiful”—went viral on social media in 2013. (See
illustration below)
 Camp
aign ad featuring Indian actress Nandita Das 
protesting skin-lightening creams.Source: Women of Worth, 
courtesy Rohit Deshpandé

Fair skin part of India’s psyche

Despite high-profile opposition, sales of fairness creams have remained brisk.
By 2015, facial care was a $1 billion market in India, and skin lighteners
represented almost half that market size. The facial care market is expected to
grow to $1.96 billion—nearly doubling in size—by 2019.

“The campaign has helped a lot in raising public awareness,” Deshpandé

says. “But if you look at whether it’s done anything to affect the sales of the
product category, the answer is no. This is a big market by any standards, and
it’s growing exponentially.”

After all, the country’s preference for fair skin has deep roots—possibly tracing
back to the lighter-skinned Aryans invading India from the north and
conquering the darker-skinned native Dravidians.

The first fairness cream, Afghan Snow, hit the Indian market in 1919, although
home remedies had been passed down even earlier from generation to
generation. In 1975, Fair & Lovely was launched by Hindustan Unilever, the
Indian subsidiary of the multinational company Unilever—and sales
skyrocketed, leading other companies to quickly follow with their own
products.

Skincare products are regulated under India’s Drugs & Cosmetics Act of 1945,
although most creams and lotions are defined as cosmetics rather than drugs,
which means companies don’t have to provide strict data about whether
fairness creams actually work. Many of the lotions inhibit melanin production,
but some dermatologists say that when the cream wears off, melanin
production returns to typical levels.

Advertising guidelines are merely “suggestions”

Stepping into the controversy, the Advertising Standards Council of India, a
self-regulatory body for the ad industry, in 2014 issued guidelines about the
advertising of skin-whitening products, saying ads should not show people
with dark skin as “unattractive, unhappy, depressed, or concerned.” But these
standards are merely guidelines, not laws. “These are not really regulations,”
Deshpandé says. “They’re suggestions.”

That leaves WOW organizers concerned that cream manufacturers can use
questionable marketing tactics to profit off of the consumer’s complexion
complex. And with fair-skinned famous actors appearing in these ads, the
push for lighter skin can have potent effects. “Bollywood is a very powerful
industry,” Deshpandé says. “These actors are role models, and the majority of
them use these creams.”
WOW founder Kavitha Emmanuel is particularly concerned about how the ads
may affect the perceptions of young consumers. “The advertising industry has
to stand up for what is right,” she says in the case. “Our young people are
already being bombarded with several messages that cause self-doubt in their
impressionable minds.”

“THERE IS A NEED IN OUR SOCIETY FOR FAIRNESS

CREAMS, SO WE ARE MEETING THAT NEED”
In January 2014, Emmanuel delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to
Emami’s Fair & Handsome, asking the brand to withdraw an ad that featured
actor Shahrukh Khan tossing a cream to an aspiring actor who wanted to be
like him. The company refused, saying, “There is a need in our society for
fairness creams, so we are meeting that need.”

The view from business

The cosmetic company's position drew support from many of the 150 business
executives in Deshpandé’s Leadership and Corporate Accountability course.
Their argument: The government has no business interfering with products
that aren’t breaking laws and, more importantly, are clearly meeting a real
consumer need.

“It was a powerful argument that played out strongly,” Deshpandé says of the
discussion among the executives, who had come from at least 20 different
countries and had worked an average of 12 to 15 years in a variety of
industries. “Consumers vote with their pocketbooks, and they’re saying they
want this product. It makes the consumer feel beautiful. Who is the
government or an activist organization to regulate or constrain consumer
demand? Let the market speak.”

For others in the course, however, it mattered how cosmetic firms were
actually encouraging the demand, Deshpandé says.

“If it’s through making consumers feel concerned about themselves, about
their bodies and skin color, (they questioned) if you psychologically
manipulate that, is it appropriate and ethical? What are the responsibilities that
an organization has to its consumers?”

The discussion drifted beyond the boundaries of India, touching on different

views about skin color around the world. In Vietnam, some women wear long
gloves and hats to protect their skin from the sun to appear fairer, while many
European and American women prefer a dark tan.
“This is an issue that manifests in many different societies,” Deshpandé says.
“Although this case study originated in India, the issues it deals with are
universal issues that business leaders have to reflect on regardless of where
they’re based.”

Related Reading
The History of Beauty
HBS Cases: Beauty Entrepreneur Madam Walker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dina Gerdeman is a senior writer for Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

Articles about Educational Issues

Are Traditional Grades a Thing
of the Past?
In classrooms around America, hands go up every day with the question, “Is this
for a grade?” But perhaps a more pressing question would be "what is a grade
for?" Today, the grades on a child's report card reflect not only a grasp of
academic subjects, but also a variety of other factors such as attendance and
behavior. Do traditional grading systems tell us what we really want to know
about a child's learning?

What’s wrong with traditional grading?

A lot, according to many experts. Under traditional grading, extra credit, late
work, class participation and non-academic assignments (returning a signed
progress report, for example) can influence a student’s score. These factors
represent life skills which, while important, don’t necessarily reflect a student’s
content knowledge.

Ellis Middle School teachers Eric Harder and Curtis Bartlett saw issues with this
firsthand at their Austin, Minnesota school, where a hard-working student with
good life skills might earn a passing grade and yet fail a standardized test, but a
student with sub standard life skills and relatively poor grades might ace that
same test. And if a substantial portion of a student’s grade consists of these non-
academic factors, then grade inflation (the awarding of higher overall scores for
lower quality work) can become an issue. Bartlett and Harder came to see
traditional scoring as potentially misrepresenting a child’s success in class.

The two 8th grade math teachers decided to study the problem of grading as part
of a grant partnership with the Hormel Foundation, the University of Minnesota
and Austin Public Schools. Their studies introduced them to Ken O’Connor’s
book A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. O’Connor, an
expert on assessment and evaluation, says that traditional grading—which takes
into account many non-academic factors such as behavior and participation—
isn’t necessarily a true representation of what kids really know.

Through O’Connor’s work, Harder and Bartlett saw a solution to this disparity:
increase evaluation accuracy by splitting students’ grades into more accurate
component parts. What began as an experiment by two curious teachers four
years ago has since branched out into a new assessment philosophy called
Grading for Learning. Grading for Learning separates the two elements of
traditional grading by assigning each student a content knowledge grade and a
behavioral life skills grade. “We believe that it is impossible to give a student one
letter grade to help parents, teachers, colleges, and
even the students themselves to get a hold of what they have learned,” says
Harder, a veteran math teacher.

Knowledge grades . . .
Knowledge grades are letter grades based on both content knowledge and local,
state and national standards. These grades are “based on students’ performance
on preset standards,” according to a Grading for Learning overview, “not on
students’ achievement compared to other students.” Grading for Learning
introduced some big changes in knowledge-based assessment at Ellis:

 Students who complete all their practice work (commonly known as

homework) can retest
 Students whose quarter percentages fall below a 50% will be adjusted to a
50% to give struggling students a better chance at passing a class
 Students are not awarded extra credit
 Students’ tests, quizzes and projects make up 90% of their knowledge
grade, while practice work comprises only 10%

The shift from homework to so-called practice work at Ellis is both semantic and
philosophical. “The word ‘practice,’ we found, has cleared some of [the homework
debate] up by having a word that means what we are doing. We are asking the
students to practice using the information we have been giving what we are
doing. We are asking the students to practice using the information we have been
giving them,” says Bartlett, a 3rd year math teacher.

. . . and life skills grades

The other half of Grading for Learning is the life skills grade, which involves four
facets of important student characteristics:

 practice (responsibility)
 preparation for class (responsibility)
 behavior (caring and respect)
 teamwork/participation (citizenship and fairness)

These characteristics are scored on a 4 point rubric in which 4 is “excellent,”

indicating that a skill is consistently practiced, and 1 is “unacceptable,” indicating
a skill that is rarely demonstrated by the student. Under conventional grading
systems, academic dishonesty or late work might have cost students points; now
such issues are seen as behavioral, not academic, and are reflected in the life
skills grade.
Reactions to Grading for Learning
Harder calls Grading for Learning “more of a philosophy,” and one that meant
changes both in and out of the classroom. The program was a bit of a hard sell at
first, and student scores dropped without the padding of non-academic points.
But ultimately, Grading for Learning does seem to be making a difference. Data
from the 2007/2008 to 2008/2009 school years showed a “significant” positive
increase in the correlation between students’ grades and their performance on
state standardized tests. And Ellis parents eventually came around:
parent/teacher communication resulted in parents having a better understanding
of where their child’s knowledge was in a subject. Frequent collaboration
involving parents, students, teachers, administrators and guidance counselors
guarantees that modifications are constantly being made to the program. “We
realized that we were really changing a local culture of education,” Harder says.
Grading for Learning has been expanded to cover approximately 900 Ellis
Middle School 6th-8th graders, and plans are in the works to adapt the program
for elementary and secondary students.

Harder is aware that this sort of change takes time. “We realize it will be many
years . . . before this is apart of standard practice,” he says. But Harder and his
colleagues see this as just the beginning of alarger shift in education: “School is
learning, not the amassing of points.”

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