From a mercenary point of view, this debate can widen a target audience, deepen meaning in a brand and create buzz. From a missionary point of view, it can help galvanise an employee base and create a more social and relevant mission for a company.

There has been a backlash against models that are too skinny, too airbrished and just too plastic. As a result, many mass-market beauty products have well-formed perspectives on the debate.

Over the last two decades the beauty debate has fuelled a wider call for authenticity from brands. Words like clear, open, genuine, straightforward and trustworthy are so commonplace in company value statements that they have simply become undifferentiating. Finding a position that will get noticed by customers in this area is becomming increasingly difficult. Following through on visions that require companies to be more authentic and open with their behaviour create a new challenging landscape that make operating under old frameworks equally difficult.

So, what started out as a simple post on the beauty debate has spilled into a shot at creating a vision that is both important to society’s needs and to your customers and employees. Thankfully, I’ve outlined this process in our paper called A Technique for Producing a More Civil Society Through Brands.