It’s not completely unheard of, but it is entirely for rewarding a company for going above and beyond.
I do some of my advertising looking for buycott (though I had never thought to think of it that way until this thread). I donate to the SPCA, and so when someone adopts a dog, they see my logo there, and are more likely to patronize me. I donate to the local school, so when someone goes to a basketball game they see that my business supports local schools. I’ve even given to NPR, so that an announcer would tell the city that my business supports public broadcasting.
Some of those are effective, some not. Some I do specifically for the exposure, some I do because they are causes that I believe in and would support anyway.
But, if a competitor does something socially unacceptable, I’ll take their clients who want to boycott them, but so will all my other competitors. It is them that they are punishing, not us that they are rewarding.
I don’t see that boycott and buycott go hand in hand, one is a punishment for doing something bad, the other is a reward for doing something good, not just for not doing something bad.
Now that you put it that way, I can see them being “hand in hand” sort of. I immediately thought of the grief/boycotting Nike got when their foreign labour practices got highlighted. Then they went on the offensive and probably got a lot of business for being more careful.
But the buycotting isn’t much of a way to force better business practices. It’s utterly passive, waiting on companies to change so you can start rewarding them.
Personally, I would never buy a bunch of junk I don’t need just to show support, since it won’t even register as a blip on the company’s radar.
As for companies who roll out new policies that are distasteful to me, even if I hadn’t patronized them previously, now I definitely will not patronize them in the future. Sticks in my mind even better than advertising!
I think it kind of takes both sides of that coin- for example, not eating at Chick-Fil-A, and when you can, directing your money to favorable alternatives like McDonald’s.
But it’s not an either-or type choice; not eating at Chick-Fil-A and eating at somewhere neutral is still better than eating at Chick-Fil-A.
When I am told that a client heard about me because they saw my ad in the HS basketball program, I am more inclined to donate to the local HS in the future.
Not all companies are giant behemoths that are unaffected by the actions of individuals.
Despite the dismissive label “slacktivism”, I wonder if nowadays the most effective form of pressure on major corps is TwitFace. Somebody or better yet a few somebodies with a large following who all start chanting “Do {whatever}” or “Don’t {whatever}” online may make more of a dent on the suits than tiny unattributable fluctuations in their revenue ever will.
I do know my Fortune 500 employer is very attuned to what TwitFace is saying about them 24/7.
To be sure, they’re not going to make major revisions in core policies because people are being mean to them on TwitFace. But it may well swing the terms of debate at a lot of internal meetings. The supertanker can change course; it just takes time to be obvious.
I wouldn’t argue it’s more effective than a boycott. But I can see why it would be effective. It wouldn’t be a situation where you spend money you weren’t going to spend anyways. It would just be giving money to support someone who does something you support.
It only makes you passive in the same way a boycott does, since you’d have to wait until a company does something you don’t support. Neither one keep you from enacting other forms of activism.
I agree that, in this context, they go hand in hand. But the focus can be different. I could be boycotting one particular company, or essentially boycotting all but this one company that’s doing something I support.
Maybe one or the other might be more effective in a given situation, but I can’t see how one would definitely be better than the other.
And, of course, none of it matters without actually making it public why you are doing it, and doing your best to get others to do it with you. It’s only when a bunch of people do it that it has any power.
And it’s a power a lot of people seem very afraid of, trying to relabel it as a cultural trend that needs to stop.
Of course boycotts have been successful. I remember boycotting grapes and lettuce in the early 70s (or rather, I talked Mom into not buying them) until the United Farm Workers got their first union contracts. Maybe you’re not old enough to recall the boycott of South African goods during apartheid. That worldwide boycott led to Congress passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. IIRC, major employers in South Africa fled in droves. The resulting economic losses helped pressure Botha into resigning and de Klerk into freeing Mandela. A few years later, apartheid ended. Boycotts were the catalyst.
In other cases, it’s not that so many people join a boycott; it’s that the company takes a massive PR hit. Potential customers may not think, “Oh, Brand X is being boycotted, so I won’t buy it,” but they may well have a vaguely negative view of Brand X and will buy Brand Y instead. The fear of this and Wall Street’s reaction is what leads companies to cave.
And another point: It’s true I wouldn’t stay at a Trump hotel anyway, but if corporations refuse to book rooms there because they don’t want to have their own images tarnished by association (thanks to the boycott), that does effect change.
Naturally boycotts don’t work in some situations. If a company is privately owned (like Chick-Fil-A), and is raking in plenty of dough from like-minded individuals, they have no motive to change. You’d have to convince conservative Christians that CFA uses stem cells in their chicken sandwiches or something in order to hurt CFA’s bottom line.
One of the problems with the unorganized, open-ended, individualized style of “boycott” where people avoid patronizing a business because it does something they find objectionable:
If they change their objectionable policy, many of those people will keep on “boycotting” them, because they don’t hear about the change, or they’re just in the habit of avoiding them, or they want to keep punishing them for what they once did.
The last buycott campaign I can think of was for Chick-fil-A a few years back (2012 I think). There was a day when certain parties, not Chick-fil-A itself, encouraged people to go to the restaurant on a specific day to support them in light of all the bad press they had been getting for donating to anti-gay groups. Was it successful? A lot of people showed up but I don’t think it made much of a difference to their bottom line. And since then Chick-fil-A has distances itself from religion and politics and instead focused on on their quality and good customer service. So I’d have to go with no.
Organized boycotts, or at least with some sort of coherent goals, can be effective (even if at the very least to get their attention, at the start). They are a useful tool that uses the market itself as a means to seek redress.
Random people deciding they’ve got a beef with a business and not wanting anything to do with them, who may not even have spent anything there anyway, not so much IMO.