Marketers spend a lot of effort trying to encourage shoppers to leave more money in the store. Specialists study psychology, cognitive distortions, and look for pain points where they can hit to increase sales. It seems that all we can do is dodge advertising attacks and try to spend our finances rationally.
But modern buyer-seller relationships are more complex than they used to be. The abundance of goods and services presented allows customers to choose. And moreover, influence the opinions of other buyers. For example, now, if a person is dissatisfied with something, he will most likely write about it on social networks.
Of course, when it comes to large organizations, most often a bad review will not have much impact on the brand. What is generally fair is that opinions are subjective and simply add up to a mosaic of the overall impression of the company. However, if a business does something egregious, customers can band together and the effect can be powerful.
How consumers boycott brands
The word “boycott” is often used to describe everyday situations when a group of people somehow ignores a person. For example, students stop communicating with a classmate. The word itself came into use at the end of the 19th century, when Irish peasants applied the method to land manager Charles Boycott. They didn’t say hello, they moved away from him in church, and so on.
Boycott – this is one of the forms of political and economic struggle, which consists in the complete or partial cessation of relations with an individual, organization, or state.
People may be reluctant to purchase or fully engage with a brand and encourage others to do the same.
However, modern consumer boycotts often arise for ethical reasons, and not due to deterioration in quality or increased prices. Typically, the motives are more complex and may not directly influence buyers.
Yes, with a boycott encountered Nike company. In the 90s, it transferred production to Asian countries on the basis of subcontracting. That is, working conditions remained at the discretion of local contractors. As a result, people in factories worked in poorly equipped premises and for extremely low wages. Then the facts of hiring children became known. The company itself insisted that they were not aware of what was happening, and adhered to this position for a long time. However, then they were forced to “move.”
To be fair, it is worth noting that it was perhaps not so much the passive boycott that played its role, but rather the active protests, due to which Nike lost contracts with sports organizations. As a result, since 2005 the company has been publishing reports on social responsibility.
Of course, Nike is not the only corporation that has been suspected of this. It was simply one of the largest and most profitable, and the boycott set a precedent. As a result, the activists did not, of course, deprive the company of income, but were able to significantly influence their level. Obviously, after the collapse of such a goliath, smaller companies responded to similar claims much more quickly. For example, when in 2010 started talking about problems at factories in India, Gap, Next and Marks & Spencer no longer ignored the situation, but began their own investigation. Although problems with sweatshops in production still remain.
There are examples successful boycott and in Russia. In 2017, information spread that Natura Siberica uses deer antlers, which are cut off from animals, in its premium line of cosmetics. The public was outraged, many stopped buying the company’s products. Natura Siberica first tried to explain themselves, and then asked their subscribers how they felt about the use of animal horns. As a result, the company announced its abandonment of this practice.
When does a boycott work?
Obviously, the ethical problem must be serious, and the protest must be massive, otherwise the voices of individual dissatisfied customers simply will not be heard. But there is another important point.
For a boycott to actually solve a problem and not just be noise for the sake of noise, the company must have room to maneuver. This is a temporary measure that gives the brand the opportunity to reflect on its behavior and improve. And he’s more likely to do it if he sees prospects for yourself. For example, in the case of Natura Siberica, not only the fact of using horns received publicity. All the company’s steps were public. Accordingly, thanks to its reaction, the company was remembered as a brand that was ready to listen to the opinions of customers and change its policies towards a more ethical one. And those who scolded the company began to praise it and promised to return to the ranks of customers.
Let’s imagine a situation where an organization is trying to fix everything, but the boycotters show by all appearances that they have buried it in their hearts. What’s the point of a brand trying to solve a problem and regain its reputation if this segment of customers has already fallen off? None.
The carrot must come with the stick.
At the same time, the effectiveness of the boycott influences the specifics of the segment in which the organization operates. If goods cannot be replaced because they are, for example, the cheapest on the market, few will be able to refuse them.
How consumers encourage and support brands through purchases
As the opposite of boycott, “boycott” appeared – the beginning of the word was replaced by the English buy (“buy”). This phenomenon means buying a brand’s products because of its policies. And here again everything is tied to ethics. Taking t-shirts with the same label because they are cool is not activism. Doing the same thing, because the company uses recycled materials and donates part of the money from sales to a support center for victims of violence, is already him. However, research showthat negative information is more motivating to refuse purchases than positive information is to make them.
A boycott is also a reaction to a boycott when a portion of customers who approve of a company’s actions specifically purchase products to support the brand. However, experts considerthat this does not have any particular impact: sales do increase, but the effect quickly wears off.
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