Target’s bias, a big strategy error, and the importance of user research
Among the many retail boycotts for many stores in 2025, few have fallen from retail grace as far as Target. Once the darling of hipsters everywhere, Target made itself a pariah in 2025 by publicly dropping its DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) program, in deference to the federal government doing the same.
Since dropping its DEI initiatives, Target has seen, as of mid-April 2025, ten consecutive weeks of drops in store traffic as a result of a national boycott. It appears that Target, by dropping DEI, has alienated many of their best customers, who have now committed to not shop at places where they would not be hired or welcomed.
How could Target, a store that has historically been welcoming to all kinds of customers, blundered so badly? I believe that the answer may be related to listening too much to customer complaints.
When complaints become bias confirmations
But wait, shouldn’t companies always be in tune to customer complaints? Yes, and this is where I think the problem originates. It appears that Target was reacting to one outsized set of data while not considering the implicit wishes of the majority of their shoppers.
To support my hypothesis, let’s go back a couple of years to May 2023. This is when Target started to get serious pushback from its years-long practice of selling Pride merchandise. Up until this point, Target did not get strong negative reactions to selling Pride items, including gender-neutral clothing items.
In 2023, with many US states pressing to pass a record number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, some customers started complaining about the Pride merchandise. Complaints at times escalated up to the point where Target employees were feeling physically unsafe. This was in part due to customers reacting to social media videos and posts insisting that Target was selling trans-friendly swimsuits in the kids’ department (of course they weren’t </eyeroll>). In reaction, Target decided to pull some Pride merchandise. The next year, Target also decided to scale back their 2024 collection of Pride offerings nationwide.
In this case, Target acquiesced to a relatively small number of loud and aggressive customer complaints to the point where they significantly altered their future sales strategy. What they ignored was the overwhelmingly large majority of customers who go to stores to get their shopping done vs. customers who go to stores looking for something to get mad about.
I am willing to assume here that most Target shoppers do not feel personally threatened by seeing items that aren’t directly marketed to them.
I am also willing to assume that the majority of Target shoppers, the ones who don’t mind seeing things that aren’t directly marketed to them, are too occupied by their daily lives to tell Target that they they don’t mind seeing Pride merchandise, because they don’t see these things as a personal threat. For these shoppers, I am also assuming that their Target visits were an intentional choice, as it “feels better” to shop there vs. competitors like Wal-Mart, because of their inclusivity. A lot of Target’s perception among shoppers was in reality a halo effect, or a positive bias towards Target.
When bias becomes a tactic
When Target received a stream of complaints about their retail practices, those complaints had a magnified impact on the company’s decision-making and it is now hurting their bottom line. There weren’t data points to support staying the course with in-store Pride displays, as shoppers likely won’t tell a retailer when something does not bother them.
Most likely, Target was looking at their evidence through a lens of a negativity bias, where negative feedback have outsize impacts vs. positive feedback. The impact was that Target believed, by looking at the evidence they had, that their universe of customers who felt threatened by Pride displays was much larger than it actually was. As a reaction, Target pulled back on promoting and carrying more inclusive merchandise so that their assumed “threatened” customer base would feel more comfortable shopping at their stores. It is also safe to assume that dropping DEI soon after was also done to appease this group of customers.
By making a relatively small group of customers feel better when they shopped at Target, the larger (and largely unheard to this point) universe of non-threatened customers started to get alienated.
When Target dropped its DEI initiatives a few months later, that alienation compounded further. These shoppers no longer felt good about shopping at Target, because now they perceived Target like any other big-box store out there; Target was supposed to be “the good one”. That perception of being “the good one” — that halo effect — will not come back easily, if ever. This has been good news for Costco, which seems to have taken the crown of being “the good one” by actively supporting DEI.
Awareness of bias is strategic
So what does Target’s downfall mean for customer experience researchers? This is instructive in that now more than ever we need to be more, not less, aware of biases when looking at data. Ways to overcome biases include field research, ethnographic research, and targeted surveying. In such a charged environment, user research, especially field research, becomes even more valuable.
Hopefully this won’t come down to rating diversity when leaving the store like rating the cleanliness of airport restrooms, by pushing a button. In-store field research could have given Target more evidence to evaluate side by side with the complaints they received.
For example, Target could have examined whether store complaints were concentrated in specific cities and states. They would also have historical sales data of Pride merchandise by location. Identifying the stores that had the most complaints vs. the most sales and doing some in-store observations in specific locations would have given Target a more complete picture of what was happening. By taking strategic action to pull back and look at the larger retail picture, Target could have addressed safety issues in affected stores instead of the tactical move of pulling merchandise in all of them.
We all know that watching videos on Facebook or TikTok is not a substitute for user research. Content on those sites are meant to cause emotional reactions based on our ingrained bias. In Target’s case, bias affirmation — partly guided by social media — led to actions that resulted in a losing sales strategy. To address biases, as in many problems, the way out is by identifying them in the data and applying strategy instead of dancing around them then reacting with tactics. The way out of your own bias is through.
