Neela Saldanha

The Bombay Shaving Company ad is exactly why companies should focus on dignity as much as they do on profits and purpose.

For those who have no context, I can’t link to the ad without giving it more publicity but the essence is that a young person does a brilliant thing and tops her tough school exam. Some folks on social media focus instead (negatively) on her appearance. Enter the razor company which puts out a full page ad, calling her out by name, expressing encouragement (“they are trolling your hair today, they’ll applaud your (rank) tomorrow.”) and ending with the line “we hope you never get bullied into using our razor.” Outrage ensues as people instinctively sense disrespect and a violation of dignity.

Dignity is a quality possessed by all humans, simply by virtue of being human. A teen has dignity.

A practical way is to think about dignity is to focus on three levers: representation, agency, equality. Representation means that people feel seen and heard, their identities are recognized and that they are not presented as a subset of their characteristics. Representation also means the ability to not be seen i.e. have privacy. This ad got representation badly wrong by focusing on a single characteristic that the person may not have wanted to focus on. Agency means that people are in control of what happens. They have a meaningful chance to consent about their experience. I’m not sure that happened here either, though the person was called out by name. And equality means what it says – treating every person equally and fairly.

So what would I do differently in their place? I find the Kantian maxim quite useful here – don’t treat people as a means to an end. And I would ask: does this person want to be seen in this way? Did I get meaningful consent to use this person’s name? Would I do the same if the person were a powerful leader? If the answers to these are “no”, I would not proceed, no matter the good intentions I may have.

What else do you think the organization could have done? What would you have done if you were a leader in this org?