For a brief moment in time, Bud Light cans were used for target practice. Across the internet, activists have jumped ship on Starbucks. Corporate boycotts have occupied our radio waves for years, but their impact is often vague.
Momentous online campaigns to boycott companies rarely maintain their steam. As with everything, the internet is quick to move on to the next, leaving these boycotts to fade into irrelevancy. If the rapidly overturning trend cycle of the internet is any indication, boycotts should be ineffective. Shockingly, however, boycotts actually work. Well … kind of.
The Scribe talked to the Chair of the UCCS Department of Economics Joseph Craig, who is also the director emeritus of the UCCS Economic Forum, to answer questions about the effectiveness of boycotts.
In your view, are boycotts generally effective? Why or why not?
“When people start boycotting something and a company is perceived as this bad player — whether or not that’s true — that brings a lot of pressure to bear,” Craig said. For companies, the pressure is social and economic. A bad reputation can result in decreased sales.
Boycotts do not look the way they used to. The internet has fundamentally reshaped the goal of boycotts. “It’s more of the social media aspect. The most successful ones [boycotts] — in terms of accomplishing their goals — have been ones where [people] don’t necessarily hate the company, they hate who the company is working with,” Craig said.
The BDS Movement is an example of the modern boycott. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement calls for sweeping boycotts of Israeli institutions. According to their mission statement, the BDS Movement seeks to “force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine.”
The boycotts of the past involved a full stop on purchasing products and goods, which Craig refers to as “not buying the thing.” Today, effective boycotts involve pressuring companies out of partnerships with other companies and causes through bad press.
“Usually, the public pressure is enough to get the company to cut ties,” Craig said. “It’s not so much destroying the good but destroying who the good is associated with. Those have been the really effective ones.”
Boycotts over individual goods and products are not effective today. Modern boycotts work because they utilize social media and the weaponization of social issues to motivate people.
Are boycotts more impactful in the short or long term? Why?
“I think short term. I think this is because of the bad press. I’ve not seen ones that are super effective that are just ‘we are not buying the good and eventually the company caves.’ Once the bad press happens, right away, it gets [companies] to respond really quickly,” Craig said.
Social media plays a crucial role in elevating boycotts to a national, even global level. But social media has a tendency to turn over at a rapid pace. The result is that boycotts often exit public consciousness as quickly as they enter it, confining them to the short term.
“If you can get in the news cycle right away, it’s very effective. Long term, nobody cares. Everyone asks, ‘ah, what are we boycotting again?’” Craig said.
How can boycotts contribute to market shifts? Do boycotts have an effect on consumers moving out of certain sectors, or moving away from certain companies?
“I would say yes, but not out of goods. What we tend to do as consumers is choose something regardless of what our feelings are, especially when our pocketbook is impacted,” Craig said.
In conjunction with a short memory, a lack of discipline affects boycotts’ impact in the long run. “We are not good at being disciplined. We want to feel like we are standing up for what we believe in, but really doing it is hard,” Craig said.
Public interest fizzles out, and, eventually, the demand for a good or service trumps feelings of moral obligation. Consequently, activists encounter difficulty when boycotting singular goods.
Where boycotts prevail is in depriving corporations of their consumer base. Boycotts cause customers to abandon certain corporations and seek goods elsewhere.
“It’s not going to get you to change your buying patterns of actual products,” Craig said, “but the corporations you choose within that space, absolutely. I think it is very effective in that way.”
Starbucks can attest to the phenomena of consumer flight. According to a CNBC interview given by Neil Saunders, the director of GlobalData Retail, “there has been a drifting away of people from Starbucks to other cafes, to independent coffee shops.” The shift is not away from the product, but from the company itself.
The ongoing boycott of Starbucks by pro-Palestinian activists has not had a monumental impact on Starbucks’s revenue, Saunders adds. However, the bad press along with other factors has contributed to burgeoning pressure on the company to correct its conduct.
Have boycotts been an effective tool for changing company behaviors in the past?
“Very much so. I think, in fact, that the PR hit changes corporate behavior,” Craig said. “Oftentimes, a boycott is super effective because someone may have no idea how a corporation is behaving until they hear about the boycott. Then they investigate, and it’s the bad PR that does it.”
To Craig, Boycotts are impactful when they can get “right in your face and quickly on the news cycle to try to incite a panic for that company.” News coverage makes the difference in how widespread a boycott is able to become.
“Companies can do something that has massive repercussions for years. One of the most recent examples was Bud Light, trying to get a transgender spokesperson, which was super innovative. Horribly backfired for Bud Light. They misjudged who their consumers were, and that’s going to stay with them,” Craig said.
The Bud Light boycott started because of a social media partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney back in 2023. Mulvaney made a promotional post for Bud Light’s March Madness giveaway. Afterward, customers flocked to social media to express their outrage.
A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found that immediately following the boycott, Bud Light’s sales and purchase incidents were about 28% lower than in previous years. Bud Light has had a difficult time recovering from its losses.
The Bud Light example is the quintessential corporate nightmare, becoming a reminder that the social stances of their consumers matter. According to Craig, corporations are very worried about misjudging something and then suddenly being “behind the 8-ball” like Bud Light was.
Boycotts may not decimate corporate revenue in every instance, but the bad press they create changes company behavior and values.
Photo courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union.