The Real Reason Boycotts Are More Effective Now Than Ever Before
Money is power. Here’s why it’s never been easier to leverage it than it is at this moment.
In the months leading up to and following the presidential election (yes, it’s hard to believe it’s been months and not years), consumer boycotts have seen an unlikely resurgence — and they’re arguably proving to be more effective than they have at any other time in American history.
In response to Trump’s infamous “Grab them by the p*ssy” tape being leaked in October, we saw the emergence of the #GrabYourWallet initiative, a Trump family consumer boycott started by Shannon Coulter, a San Francisco-based social media marketing specialist as a passion-fueled side project she managed with a friend in her spare time. It immediately gained traction: By the end of January, the hashtag had been tweeted more than 213,000 times and garnered more than 600 million impressions.
The Grab Your Wallet movement continues to thrive today in the form of a widely-consulted, meticulously-managed list of corporations with business ties to members of the Trump family that conscientious shoppers consult to easily boycott them. It’s so popular that you can now even install a Chrome plugin that will notify you if you visit a website on the boycott list. It’s been effective, too—in the 225 days since Grab Your Wallet launched, at least 23 companies on the boycott list have fully cut their financial ties with the Trump family.
The boycott movement has only grown from there.
In January there was the #DeleteUber campaign, which was launched to protest CEO Travis Kalanick’s seat on Trump’s economic advisory board and Uber’s apparent undermining of a taxi union protest against Trump’s immigration ban. As a result of that campaign, more than 200,000 people deleted the app, and Kalanick stepped down from Trump’s advisory council. Rideshare competitor Lyft also capitalized on the moment by making a public $1 million pledge to the ACLU. Those are impressively significant outcomes for hashtag-based activism.
The Twitter account Sleeping Giants offers another shining example of successful boycott movement. Participants are encouraged to publicly call out companies with advertisements on Steve Bannon’s website Breitbart.com by posting screenshots of their ads on the site on Twitter, and urging others to boycott until the ads have been pulled. As it turns out, many corporations bought the ad space as part of a package and are completely unaware that their ads are being displayed alongside extremely racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic content—that is, until a Sleeping Giant lets them know about it. Very publicly. Since the campaign launched, over 2,100 companies have pulled advertising from Breitbart.
There’s one very simple reason consumer boycotts are more effective now than ever before: Twitter.
Since long before the invention of the internet, activists have a always known that it’s more important to let a company know—as publicly as possible—why you’re boycotting them than it is to actually participate in the boycott.
Huge corporations are unlikely to notice much of an impact on their margins unless the boycott reaches truly epic proportions. But they do take notice of any public tarnishing of their brand image, since the impact of far-reaching negative public perceptions can take years to overcome (if it’s overcome at all), and doing so can get extremely expensive in the long run.
In the past, this meant effective boycotts required organizers and participants to send letters to shareholders, hold public demonstrations, and hustle to get as much media exposure as possible.
Now, it can be as simple as typing 140 characters and hitting send.
Emailing a company directly and/or sharing your reasons for boycotting on other social media platforms can also be powerful tools—ultimately, the more ways they hear from the more of us, the more effective we’ll be overall. But on Twitter, ideas can spread like wildfire in a matter of hours, all in plain view of anyone with an internet connection. And that has the power of scaring corporations straight.
When enough of us tag corporations in our tweets about a boycott, we ensure that their feed is overwhelmed with people urging them to make positive change — something any executive with a mandate to maintain a positive social media presence is guaranteed to sit up and take notice of.
“Consumers have a lot more power than they did in the past, particularly younger people because companies desperately want the lifetime value of their business,” Shannon Coulter, the founder of Grab Your Wallet, told Mashable. “That power can be wielded to inspire positive changes that wouldn’t otherwise happen… Together, we can accomplish a lot.”
We created the Nudge for Change app to make it easier than ever to put your money where your beliefs are. The app will alert you if you’re about to spend your hard-earned cash in a way that doesn’t align with your core values — by shopping at a business with financial ties to Trump, for example—and nudge you toward nearby alternatives you can feel good about supporting.
It’s like having a backup for your moral compass on your phone.
Nudge for Change is currently available for iOS. An Android version is coming soon.
