July 22, 2025 • 45 mins
We have boycotts coming out of our ears these days, but did you know they go back a couple centuries? And that it’s named after the first poor sap to be boycotted? We follow the history of boycotts up today’s boycott superstars and ask how well they work.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just the two of us, and we
are doing an episode on boycotts today because boy boycott's
really sticking your crawl. Did a lot of them. They
seem to be overused in this era, and I wanted
to see how the whole thing worked, just from watching
(00:31):
them happen over and over again.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah. Well, you know Webster's defines a boycott as a
collective active refusal. Yeah, so does Steve, who help us
with this. But you know what we're talking about, right,
that's when people get together these days. Usually it's a
call on social media or something, and they say, hey,
we're not going to buy this thing from your store,
or we're not gonna buy anything from your store, or
(00:54):
we're not gonna buy anything from your company, or we're
not going to buy anything from your state or country
because we want to hit your bottom line, hitch in
the wallet.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
As they say, to get you to change.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, I mean to get you to change, or I think,
in some people's cases these days, just to be mean
because I hate what you stand for.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, so I want to say I'm not poop pooing
the entire concept of boycotts. What what I was taking
issue with is just how fast and loose they come,
over and over that if you really followed every boycott
like you had starve to death, there'd be nowhere you
could buy food any longer, let alone anything else.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, yeah, and can I quickly say also that these
sort of so many calls for these boycotts and social media,
they're also I feel like a lot of times like
just not thought out and that like you're boycotting this
one thing, but the same company owns this other thing
that you like, and they just seem to be kind
of the dumb version of boycotts.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, they're very knee jerk, they're not very organized, and
they're just emotionally driven. All boycotts have some level of
emotion and to them driving them, But there's also supposed
to be a lot more to them if you're gonna
make it successful.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah, and we're gonna cover all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But also one more thing, Chuck, I am also not
poopooing anybody caring about something that's great. I will always
promote somebody caring about something that's important to you, and
a lot of people show that they care by joining
in on boycotts or maybe even starting boycotts.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah. I mean you're known as the guy who cares.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Who's been calling me that the public at large.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I think that's your nickname on Reddit, the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Boy who cares and the best all around boy.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Oh man, look at that match made and heaven.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The barb, the BHC and the barb.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So let's start talking about boycotts because, like I said,
I was curious in how they worked. We havesked David
help us with them. And what I didn't know right
out of the gate is that Boycott is somebody's last name.
The first guy whoever on record, got boycotted was named
Charles Cunningham Boycott.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah. That seems like something we would make up as
a bit, yeah, but it's actually totally true. He was
an Englishman living in Ireland and County Mayo, and he
was a rent collector, specifically would collect rent for absentee
British landlords from Irish tenant farmers who were having a
very rough time in eighteen seventy nine, down on.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Their luck, as you'd put it. There was a terrible famine.
This is after the Great Irish Potato famine, but this
one wasn't so wonderful either, And so these farmers were
not exactly looking forward to being evicted for being behind
on rent. And Boycott apparently seems to be one of
those people who had like he just followed the rules.
You're the one who's not paying your rent, so get out.
(03:44):
And the Irish people in County Mayo decided to do
something about it. They formed an organization called the Land League,
and they were agitating for fair rents. They were agitating
for an end to evictions, and Charles Boycott just kept
evicting people. So they're like, we've got to try something else.
What can we do. Let's do everything we can to
ruin Charles Boycott's life.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, and if there was only a name for this kind.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Of action, they're like, we'll get to that later, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
But we can't think of one. So later, in a
letter to the Times of London, Boycott basically kind of
summarize what they had been doing. And we're not going
to read all this word for word, but you know,
they really screwed with his business. He's you know, they
collected in crowds on his farm. They you know, would
harass him at his house. They threatened people that worked
(04:31):
for him, like his blacksmith apparently got a letter threatening
him with murder if he did any more work for him.
They threatened his laundress to stop washing his clothes, and
he couldn't get anybody to do any kind of work
for him, basically and ruined his business. It became a
big story, like not just there, but kind of internationally.
The British newspapers picked it up. The British newspapers also
(04:54):
raised funds to send fifty Northern Irish loyalists to harvest
his potato crop, because you could didn't get anyone to
do it because they were afraid they'd get you know,
physically beaten or harassed, and they were protected by British troops.
And apparently, by one account, it cost ten thousand pounds
to harvest five hundred pounds worth of potatoes from those
(05:14):
Northern Irish loyalists.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I did some conversions, let's hear it. So if they
spent ten thousand pounds sterling to harvest these potatoes, they
spent a million pounds sterling or one point four million
dollars in today's money to harvest fifty two thousand pounds
sterling or seventy thousand dollars worth of potatoes. Isn't that insane?
(05:38):
That really just drives it home. That's why I do
those conversions, Yeah, because I want to drive at home.
How nuts?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That was totally nuts. He left Ireland boycott did in disgrace.
It was a very successful challenge to his authority. Can't
call it a boycott yet, but you could very soon
because American journalist James Redpath said, you know what, the
first person who used that as a verb was a
local priest, believe it or not. His name was Father O'Malley,
(06:06):
who said, I believe he suggested the land League try
the same thing on another landlord named Brown, and he said,
let's do what they did to boycott. Let's do a
boycott on this Brown. That's what we're gonna do. We're
going to boycott Brown. See the word is a verb,
it's boycott. You understand.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
That was a great father O'Malley.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, And so just by covering father O'Malley using it
as a verb. Writing about these new boycotts, James Redpath,
who appears to have been a contemporaryaneous journalist to this time.
He kind of helped generate this idea that you could
actually get stuff done by boycotting. People check this out.
(06:51):
And so I think in the next year there are
more than a thousand boycotts in Ireland without social media.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, there were thousand boycotts, and that means father O'Malley
one hundred thousand times said, remember it's called boycotten.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
That is so good. We're going to get two emails
from people who aren't even Irish that are mad at
us for doing that. Yeah, and then fifteen emails from
people from Ireland who are like that was a hilarious
chuck totally, that's how it goes.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and maybe one from father a father O'Malley, because
I know there's a bunch of them.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Ye, I'm going to say, that doesn't narrow it down
at all.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
So yeah, that's where the whole boycott got started in
County Mayo, Ireland. And since then people have studied these
things and have really kind of gotten down to almost
the science what it would take to make a boycott effective,
and there have been a lot of effective boycotts over
the years. We're going to talk about some of them,
(07:50):
but to just kind of pull apart the nuts in
the bolts. There's just a handful of things that you
really have to do just right, and then it's sprinkle
it with a little bit of luck and you could
have an effective boycott on your hands.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
I think you meant just a little bit of luck.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, a little bit of leper kind.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Dust right, Yeah, for sure. These are the one, two, three, four,
five six things you need to do. If you you know,
you can boycott your day away. But if you want
to really be effective these there at least i'd say
probably four out of six of these need to be around.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah. Six steps to ruining target's market share.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You gotta have a clear goal in mine, which means
you have an outcome in mind. Basically m hm. You
want to narrow target. So you want to either target
like a very narrow like a product or just a
single company. H That's why sometimes when I think about like, yeah,
you're targeting this company, but like the parent company isn't targeted.
I don't know. That's where it can get a little messy.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
I think, yeah, and poor targets, Like can you guys
stop using the word target when you're talking about boycotts.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Uh, there's also awareness and education, because your your goal
here is to not only getting them to change whatever
they're doing, but to bring awareness and educate people and
whatever you feel like they're doing wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Well. Plus also the more support you have, the better
off you are.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, yeah, good point.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
You also want to reach core customers. This is a
very important point.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
They've turned up an expert in boycotts and studying boycotts
who said, essentially, if you have a bunch of PEDA
members who are boycotting Kentucky Fried Chicken, like, that's not
going to have much an effect because none of those
PEDA members were ever buying Kentucky Fried Chicken in the
first place. And yeah, maybe you could generate some public sympathy,
but you're not getting to their core customers necessarily. Yeah,
(09:37):
and that's what makes it effective.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
What else, Yeah, Uh, there's sustain Uh, there's substitutability. This
is a big one, because if you can very easily
switch to another brand of whatever, then it's going to
make your boycott far more effective. Like if then you know,
we'll get to other examples later. But like you know,
with the big blood Light boycott was a very big
(09:59):
and we're going to cover later. It was really easy
for the people who wanted a boycott by light to
switch to another, like an expensive light beer. So that
was a pretty effective boycott because it's like super easy. Yeah,
I'll just drink Miller Led or whatever, right.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Or I'll go to churches or Popeyes rather than Kentucky
Fried Chicken exactly. And then also like if you want
a successful boycott, you have to really like nail in
that bottom line. You really got to hurt the company
financially if you want to make them at least start
listening to you, if not actually enact the change that
(10:33):
you're looking for. And you know, in times past, essentially
pre social media era, that was the one measure of boycotts,
that is how you got a company to respond. You
started really affecting either their sales or their stock price,
and more and more often than not their stock price. Nowadays,
because of social media, bad press can spread so fast
(10:56):
and so far and so wide that just getting like
negative press can actually make large corporations or organizations change
their stance on something or make them drop their stance
in total.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, for sure, that's a very good point. It's a
little bit different ballgame these days. Should we take our break? Yeah,
all right, we'll take a break. We'll be right back
to as promised, talk about some of the most famous
boycotts throughout history. All right, we're back in this promise.
(11:55):
We're gonna take you on a little walk through the
history of boycotts. And we got to start with Colonial
because they were good at it. A lot of times
they were boycotting an act that was passed by the
British that they did not like. Over here in the
New Colonies. They had some pretty wicked branding with slogans
like no taxation without representation. They were pretty good at
(12:17):
that kind of thing. And the first one we're going
to talk about is seventeen sixty five. I know we've
talked about, you know, all these kind of here and
there in the life of the show. But the Stamp
Act was passed in sixty five, which was a tax
on paper goods and documents and things like that, and
the merchants in Boston and New York said, nope, we're
going to sign a non importation agreement and we're not
(12:40):
going to import goods from England anymore. And it worked
about a year later, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, first boycott and the we should say the American colonies.
It could see our Australian and New Zealand listeners. Good,
I don't remember any of this, what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Yeah, lots of colonies.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This happened in the American colonies, right, that's right. Shortly
after that, so Parliament's trying to pay for the Seven
Years War, the French Indian Wars, what the American colonists
called it. So they were then now directly taxing the
American colonies, and they followed up with the Stamp Act
with the Townsend Revenue Act in seventeen sixty seven. It
(13:16):
taxed a bunch of different stuff. The colonists organized a
bunch of protests and boycotts again, and Parliament responded and
they repealed the Townsend Act three years later, but they
kept one part of it. They kept a tax on tea.
Everyone loved tea in the American colonies, as I'm sure
in Australia and New Zealand too at the time. So
(13:37):
it was a big deal to have this big tax
on tea. And so the American colonists said, well, we're
not going to drink British tea, and in Parliament said oh, yeah,
well get this. We're going to give the East India
Company basically free reign on selling below costs for tea,
so that even with this tax, it's going to cost
(13:58):
you less for tea than buying this smuggled illegal tea
that normally is cheaper with the tax.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
So some merchants were like, well, it sounds kind of
good to me. I can make more money. And the
people here in the American colonies we call the patriots,
the founding fathers said nay to that, and that actually
led to the Boston Tea Party.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, the Sons of Liberty said no, thanks for get
a demputee in the Hobba.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Wow. I mean, you are killing it today all over
the place.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And that's what they did. In seventeen seventy four of
the First Continental Congress passed a colony wide ban on
all trade with Britain. And that was the beginning of
what would become a war.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, it worked then, it worked later And I mean
they didn't have a name for this because this was
before the County Mayo Boycott's and Charles Boycott. But they
were like this unnamed thing that we're doing. It really
kind of works, and so it inspired other groups that
came along in America over the court. So the coming centuries,
(15:01):
especially if you were part of a civil rights organization,
boycotts proved very effective. They are really worthwhile to do
because most of the time, if you're agitating for civil rights,
you have a group of true believers who are willing
to actually work at this. And one of the first
(15:22):
groups fighting for civil rights in the United States were
the Quakers Quaker abolitionists, and they formed something called the
Free Produce Movement.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, this was in the eighteen forties through the Civil
War basically, and they boycotted goods made by enslaved people,
cotton of course being one of the keys there. And
as far as they were concerned, like, hey, if you're
buying the stuff, you're supporting slavery. So the Free Produce
Movement sort of tackled that. Another obvious example as far
as civil rights go is the great Montgomery bus Boycott,
(15:54):
which we covered in detail in our episode from February
twenty eighteen. Rosa Parks colon Asient of Change, So you
can go listen to that episode for the full rundown
of the Montgomery bus boycott. But that was a couple
of highlights for me was the fact that before Rosa
Parks came along. I always want a chance to shout
out fifteen year old Claudette Colvin who in March nineteen
(16:17):
fifty five refused to move so a white passenger could
take her seat. She was also yanked off the bus
and arrested by the cops. But they would end up
rallying around Rosa Parks instead about nine months later. And
then the other thing I just wanted to highlight, and
again you should listen to that episode because it's really
in depth, but was that the black community rallied around
(16:38):
each other in like a big way, Like black taxi
drivers would charged the same fare as the bus fair
would be. They had volunteers organizing carpools. They had shoe
drives because people were walking so much, they were wearing
their shoes out to get people in fresh shoes. And
it's a really beautiful moment in American history.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, and it was a real struggle for them because
this is how black people in Montgomery largely got around
was the bus. So to give that up was a
big deal, and it was a successful boycott. It lasted
three hundred and eighty two days until the Supreme Court
ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. If your boycott
leads to a Supreme Court ruling that what you're fighting
(17:18):
against is unconstitutional, that is a successful boycott, Yeah, for sure.
And then one other thing about the Montgomery bus boycott
is that it directly inspired another boycott a few years
later that involved the United farm Workers grapegrowers or grape harvesters.
I should say that was led by Caesar Chavez, and
I mean one of the things that he did that
(17:40):
also makes boycott successful that we talked about was educating
the public. They created bumper stickers that said uvas, no,
no grapes. They told people what was going on, and
they got public support. That really helped these boycotts really
helped put the pressure on the grape growers to give
the grape harvesters better work and can nditions.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Can we talk about apartheid?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I think we should so.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Apartheid was segregation in South Africa. It was their version
of legal segregation of their people of the white minority
and the black majority in South Africa, and it was
around since nineteen forty eight through basically the mid nineties
to when it finally dissolved, I think was like ninety four.
(18:25):
And the repeal of apartheid is partially credited to international pressure,
Boycott's sanctions, divestment and little Stevie van zandt Yeah, and
little Stevie VanZant. We'll get to him in a sec
But the nonviolent protests were a big part of it,
led by the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela was one
(18:45):
of the leaders in the ANC. So in nineteen fifty nine,
A and C president Albert Luthuli said, Hey, great Britain,
why don't you boycatt all South American produce, all South
African produce the first time they kind of reached out
Internet for help like that, and so South Africa said,
you know what, we're outlawing the ANC and Nelson Mandela,
(19:07):
you're going to jail.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, yeah, for suggesting a boycott, not even staging a boycott,
but suggesting one. The UN got involved in nineteen sixty
two and they were like, hey, guys, this is not okay.
We all or you guys need to start breaking ties
with South Africa, And everybody said nuts to that. And
it took a bunch of different sports organizations to finally
(19:30):
get the public aware of it and hence getting governments
involved in doing something about dismantling apartheid by turning their
backs in South Africa. And the first sports organization to
cut ties without South Africa in protests of its apartheid
policies was the International Table Tennis Federation, who did so
all the way back in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Pretty great. Yeah, I love that. In sixty four the
IOC committee said no South African teams can participate in
the Olympics. Yeah, and that was a band that lasted
from sixty four to ninety two, so very long standing.
There were boycott's in Britain when South African cricket and
rugby teams which were there.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, there was a very famous Battle for Swansea, I think,
where there was like a rugby protest that the cops
and some hooligans started beating up and it just became
a huge thing and made international news too.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah. I mean I remember all this stuff growing up
in the eighties. It was all over the news. You
couldn't like, you couldn't like go ten minutes without hearing
the word apartheid or anti apartheid.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
I mean I knew the President of South Africa's name
as like a ten year old, because what was it,
fw de Clerk.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, you're like I knew it at ten. I don't
know that.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
No, I'm almost positive that.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah it was, I remember to Clerk.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yet I learned about it from Mad magazine.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Of course, the eighties is also when you got college
kids involved in that. You know, if you want to
get college kids on your side, that's a pretty smart
thing to do, because they got nothing else to do,
take like a couple of classes a day maybe, And
so they got together, started their activism on campus, and
(21:08):
more than one hundred and fifty US colleges divested from
South Africa, so they withdrew investments in South African companies
as institutions as a whole. That was a un cultural boycott,
and part of that ended up being something and started
in eighty five called the Artist United Against Apartheid, founded
by Little Stephen van Zant of the EA Street Band
(21:29):
and a producer named Arthur Baker, who organized a song
sun City and an album sun City because sun City
was a luxury resort in Casino in South Africa that
had a lot of big time concerts, and the song
basically was I Ain't going to play sun City and
it was a you know, it was sort of on
the heels of We Are the World, but this one
(21:50):
was different because they you know, there were certainly black
artists on We Are the World, but not rap and
hip hop, and Sun City had Bono of course, and
Bob Dylan and Ringo and Bruce of course, Pat Benatar,
George Clinton, Joey Ramon in a very weird appearance, Hall
and Oates, but not together. They were very much separated.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
It is so sad to me.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Lou Reid also had a very funny appearance Bonnie Rate.
But you also had run DMC and Cool Mode, the
Fat Boys, DJ Cool Hirk, Grandmaster, Melly Mel, Jimmy Cliff
was in there. So it really blended genres in a
way that We Are the World did not, and it
was a pretty good song. I think it is very eighties.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
It's definitely worth seeing the video for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think they ended up raising
like a million bucks, so not a lot of money,
but awareness is probably one of the biggest things because
a lot of artists would not play sun City, but
artists did very famously. There's a list the Beach Boys did, Share,
did Linda Ronstadt, did Sinatra? Did e Liza Minelli, Rod
Stewart very disappointingly, Elton John Queen and Dolly Parton call
(22:58):
played sun City.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
And Dolly oh. You know, so it was fairly heartbreaking
to read that, Yeah, because this wasn't like a oh
I hadn't heard kind of thing. This was like, I
don't care enough, I'm going to go to Sun City.
They're paying me a bunch of money to go to
this one concert date that I could easily cancel, you.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Know, yeah, agreed. Supposedly, I'm not even going to say
in their defense because I don't really know what they
were thinking, But supposedly they were told by the people
at sun City, like, hey, there's an exception for us,
and we can actually have a segregated audience, so like
you should come play. So I don't know if that's
the guys they did in under or not. That's the list.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah. So yeah, so this is a big deal. Like
sports entertainment, that's a really good way to get your
boycott spread far and wide, because that's what the average
person is paying attention to more than like the news
or foreign policy. They're like, wait a minute, why is
cool Mode not going to South Africa? I should probably
look into that. And so when you get people into it,
(23:57):
things actually happen. Right there was the US Congress passed
the Comprehensive Anti Aparthepe Act, and it was one of
the more putative sanctions packages the America has ever dealt
against any country. And Ronald Reagan even vetoed it and
Congress overrode his veto. Was the first time in thirteen
(24:19):
years that Congress had overridden a presidential veto, and they said, no,
this is getting passed, and so it did get passed.
And you know, you might be like, wow, that was
brave and assertive of Congress. They must really have cared
about dismantling apartheid, and I'm sure some of them did.
But I think what it says more than anything is
just how far and wide America was anti apartheid by
(24:41):
this time. That Congress is like, we're going to override
a presidential veto of the most popular president America's had
in recent history, because all of our constituents.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Are like, go do that, yeah, because they read about
cool mode. Yeah, they wouldn't have it, yep. Yeah. And
you know a lot of time, when the US does something,
the world follows back then at least, and once the
US put their sanctions in place, other countries came aboard
in Europe and Asia, and a lot of economic pressure
was put on South Africa and Mandela was Eventually the
(25:13):
Berlin Wall fell in eighty nine, which basically said South
Africa is not like a protection against communism in Africa, now,
no need for that. Mandela was freed ninety and then
over the next four years it was kind of little
by little dismantled. I think finally ninety four it was
when it was officially over.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So that was successful, ful, I would say, for sure.
There was another one that was pretty successful that was
much more recent. Back in twenty sixteen, in North Carolina,
they passed the Public Facilities, Privacy and Security Act, much
more well known as the Bathroom Bill, which basically said
that in North Carolina, you have to use a public
restroom for the sex that you were assigned at birth.
(25:51):
So essentially it's like trans people, you can't use public
restrooms that you identify with. People call it mean spirited,
evil it was anti trains, It was an attack on
a group of people, and it really it kind of
took off. It became one of the first really viral
boycotts on social media back in twenty sixteen. It had
(26:12):
a huge effect.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, and this was one where hitting in the wallet
was a big deal because corporations got involved. PayPal cancel
plans to build an office in Charlotte. You know, entertainers
got involved. The course, Springsteen as always the Boss wouldn't
play in sun City or Greensboro.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Ain't gonna played Greensboro.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And then of course a lot of other bands said
what the Boss does we follow movie studios pulled out,
which hit them in the financial pocketbook. Of course, said
we're not going to shoot there. Sports again gets involved.
The NCAA moved several different college championships out in North Carolina.
The NBA threat to pull the All Star Weekend out
of Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
They followed two They moved it to New Orleans that year.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Yeah, so all this told cost of the state of
North Carolina three point seven six billion dollars in the
year that that bill was around. They repealed it in
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Man, that's crazy that's a lot of money to lose
in just a year.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Chuck, And that's why it was effective.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
So you want to take a break and come back
and talk about whether social media boycotts are effective, let's
do it. Okay. So we're back, and we have entered
(27:47):
a brand new age of boycotts. Thanks to social media.
It is really easy to start a boycott, for a
boycott to go viral, and then for the news to
report on boycott's and how they did. It's almost it's
like a spectator sport to a certain extent. Oh, here's
this new boycott how to do? Two months on, I
saw an article on Newsweek and the title was, here
(28:09):
are the corporations being boycotted in June. It's just become
that like pedestrian.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, I mean, we should read this one stat there's
one study that found that fifty four percent of top
brands more than half have been boycotted, huh, and forty
two percent of multinational corporations. And we're not saying like
poor multinational corporations, but just sort of driving home the
point like you were saying that. I mean, you said,
you know, two months later, we'll see how it's doing.
(28:36):
Two months later, people might be like, oh, are we
boycotting that still?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I thought that was done. I thought we'd moved on,
which is kind.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Of the one of the problems with the social media boycotts.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It is because with social media, I mean by definition,
it's your attention span is just careening from place to
place constantly. It's really hard to stop and focus. And
that's a big thing that boycotts require, his focus, dedication,
organization growth. When you know two, yeah, when three quarters
(29:05):
of the people who are boycotting with you the first
week moved on to something else, your boycott's hurting, right.
But that is not to say that boycotts starting on
social media aren't effective. And there's a couple in very
recent memory that you can use to show how what's
effective and what isn't effective, because that's what people like
(29:25):
to do with boycotts these days. Talk about that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, And we should also point out that you're going
to hear another word in describing these things. It's a
word bycott, and that is the counter to boycott. When
because most of these are or political in nature, obviously
hot button issues and evenly sort of divided because the
United States is pretty much evenly divided at the point
politically down.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
To a guiding Eugene who votes twice for one freach party,
just to be fair. That's how divided America is.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, So when there is a boycott, there is also
generally a bycot when the other part of the country says, oh, yeah,
well I'm going to buy that thing because you don't
want to buy that thing, because we like what they're saying. So,
Goya is a very popular Hispanic food brand here in
the US. Great black beans. I love this Goya black beans, Goya,
that's right. In twenty twenty, it was big news when
(30:19):
the CEO of Goya attended an event at the White
House and was praising Donald Trump, and a lot of
people got upset about that, and Democratic Representative Alexandria Acasio
Cartes said, hey, we need a boycott Goya. And it
turns out that that didn't work so well because it
didn't hit enough of those things that you need to
(30:39):
do to have a successful.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Boycott, and also because AOC is a bycot magnet for sure.
So there were a couple of things. So there was
a The boycott sparked a bycot among conservatives because in
the United States. For those of you who don't live here,
when you choose a side on a boycott, you're defending
your political beliefs. That's just how they work here. I'm
(31:03):
not sure if it's like that the rest of the
world around, but that is definitely how they work here.
And the reasons that Goya wasn't successful as a buy
or as a boycott was because there are a lot
of people Latin Hispanic households who did not have a
dog in that fight, who did not choose sides, who
were not like, what are you talking about? We buy
Goya products, like this doesn't make any sense. And then
(31:25):
a lot of those households also are conservatives too, so
they probably would have bought Goya products had they not
been buying them already, just to show their support.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, and the bycot that it triggered, apparently Goya got
a twenty two percent bump in sales because of that bycot,
but it did not last long because, like you said,
a lot of those people who were like, yeah, I'm
gonna start buying Goya stuff because this guy praised Donald Trump,
they weren't Goya customers before. So maybe sometimes you get
(31:54):
someone from a bycot that's like, hey, these black beans
are dynamite. That that's my brand from now on. But
in this case, it was a quick bump in sales
and then they were like nope, back to old l
Paso and those sales kind of leveled out.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yes, that's actually on the if you flip flop the
political spectrum. The same thing happened to Nike not too
many years ago when they supported Colin Kaepernick while he
was taking a knee during the national anthem, and there
was a huge backlash on social media against Nike for
supporting him. Their people were burning their Nikes and making
(32:31):
videos of it, posting it on social media. But it
spurred a bycot to support Nike, and Nike made out
like bandits for that. They had what analysts suspect was
an additional six billion dollars in sale in a handful
of weeks following the boycott. The call for the boycott,
(32:52):
the buycot gave them that much extra money. The support
came out for them like that.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
That's right. Then the NFL got back at Colin Kapernick
by essentially blackballing him.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah, so we should probably mention.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Bud Light because we mentioned it earlier. That was another
very recent one. In twenty twenty three, transgender influencer Dylan
mulvaney had a TikTok video announcing a contest sponsored by
bud Light, and in that video had the nerve to
show a can of bud Light that the company center
with an image of her face on it. And that
was it. The conservative right got up in arms and
(33:26):
they said bud Light is dead to us, Go woke,
go broke. And in the three months following that post
bud Light sales went down twenty eight percent compared to
the same period in prior years, and the damage was
worse in Republican leaning districts I think thirty two percent
compared to twenty two percent in Democrat districts.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah, but ultimately overall, eight months after the initial boycott
they were down thirty two percent overall in sales.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, So I mean it was a successful boycott by
all accounts.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Man, they went berserk about that. It was a big
deal here in the US, that bud Light. So just
to be clear, they sent Dylan mulvaney one can with
Dylan Mulvaney's face on it. This was not for sale
or anything like that, but that was all it took.
And yeah, bud Light just took a beating. They were
(34:17):
the number one selling beer. I don't even think just
light beer, I think beer in the United States. And
they dropped down. They dropped down to third in just
a few weeks. Right. The reason why, there are a
few reasons why substitutability. You could easily just switch to
Corslight Miller's Light, and your tastebuds would have no idea
that you'd switched. But apparently a lot of people switched
(34:40):
to MODELO Especial, which we'll get to in a second.
And then also, and this explains why bud Light did this,
because in retrospect, you're like, that was one of the
more tone deaf things that a brand has ever done.
But it turns out bud Light's customer base is pretty
evenly divided along the political spectrum. So I think they
just thought like they were doing what they do and
(35:02):
we're clearly not expecting that kind of backlash. Companies in
that situation are much more vulnerable to a backlash when
they take any kind of political stance or social stance.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, like when it's a pretty even split on who
likes your product, exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, because I mean if it were all like if
bud Light's entire customer base were LGBTQ, they put if
they had Dylan mulvany be like a brand ambassador, it
would not matter at all. But because half of their
people probably have unflattering views on trans people, yes, it
really put a herding on them. And then the last
one was observability is what they call it.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, sometimes you consume a product in private, like the
black beans you're eating.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Right out of the can.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, you're not just walking around eating a can of
black beans in public. But other stuff, you know, it's
a little more visible and like you know, tailgating and
being out in public with a beer, being in a
bar with a beer, it's a much more public product
that you're consuming. And researchers found that even if you
were liberal and you were a beer drinker, you might
have avoided drinking bud Light in public just because of
the controversy over it.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
One of the big there's an ironic twist I guess
to this whole thing. I said that MODELO Especial became
I think the number one selling beer after bud Light
dropped off in the couple weeks after the boycott started
against bud Light, Modello's sales went up thirty six million
dollars more than bud light sales.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, so Modello is like, this is great. The thing
is is Modello and bud Light are both owned and
distributed by the same companies, So it was like robbing
Peter to pay Paul, or a Twitter user put it.
I think I found this on Vox maybe in an
article by Stephanie grob Plante. It was like boycotting the
Big Mac by eating a quarter pounder instead.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Yeah, and that's kind of what I was talking about
earlier with just I think boycotts are just not thought
through as much these days because I don't know, there's
so many mega companies that own all these smaller things.
You really got to do your homework to figure out, like,
wait a minute, I can't switch to this thing because
they're also owned by that thing.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah. I think though that one's not the most slammed
dunk ironic twist there is, because I think even if
they knew that it was the same general company Anheuser Busch,
the iyer was directed at bud Light. They wanted to
punish bud Light the brand specifically.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, and they were definitely successful with that.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah. Good point.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
So, Chuck, there's a couple of things. I think we
should wrap it up by talking about, like whether these
things are worth doing, whether companies should take a social stance.
Let's do that, shall we?
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, we mentioned earlier that
it doesn't necessarily have to be the big financial hit
to cause the problem these days, just the bad press
and then a negative press can hurt a company's reputation.
That could potentially hurt a stock price, but I mean, really,
the only thing that's going to damage the stock price
or bad sales. So at the end of the day,
(38:05):
it kind of is money. They can probably withstand bad press,
but they don't love it.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
No, But if you can turn the markets on the company,
that's a big deal.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah for sure. As far as whether people think companies
should get involved with this, it depends on who you asked.
There was a survey I think from twenty seventeen, is
that right, Mm hmm, yeah, not too long ago. It's
found that ninety percent of American consumers expect companies to
take an active role in addressing social concerns. There was
a different survey that found that sixty three percent of
(38:36):
millennials and sixty percent of gen xers I think companies
have a more important role than governments do in driving
social change. So those are pretty disparate numbers.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Right, And people who advise companies, like there's an entire
industry on advising companies on stuff like this. They say
it comes down to the company culture. Do you stand
for things? Is are you the kind of company that
would ever stand for anything? Or are you just trying
to sell duck boots? You know, you have to ask
yourself these kind of things. Do you want to change
to be a different kind of company? Who knows. But
(39:07):
one of the things that they find is that it
is often worse to take a stand and then change
your stance than to take your stance at all, like
Target's wishy washy stance on DEI policies, right or Apparently
Another big one is companies will celebrate Pride Month in
a country that's that where Pride Month is much more acceptable,
(39:29):
they and then just not celebrate it in other countries
where there is Pride Month but it's not quite as
accepted as it is in the other countries. So having
like a wishy washy stance on stuff that can really
damage your company's image because if you basically are telling
the world like, we don't really actually have any values,
we don't really care about anything social, We're just trying
(39:51):
to make money here. So even if you are a
company that chooses to take a stance, you really need
to stick with it and just stick with it did
or else just don't do it at all, but don't
make it take a stand and then backpedal.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Josh's advice to Corporate America, right.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
And then on the other side, if you're just an
everyday person and you want to take part in a boycott.
I think one of the issues, Chuck, that we kind
of were hinting around throughout this episode is that a
problem is that you can become complacent like you're doing
enough by you know, liking a tweet and then not
buying Kellogg's cereal for a week, and at the end
(40:30):
of the day you feel like you're doing your part
when you're really not doing much and there's a lot
more work to be done. That's kind of a big
danger of it, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I got to tell you, rand I'm very relieved because
a few minutes ago, I thought you were about to
say something about ll Bean. Nope, when you mentioned duck boots,
I was like, oh no, don't tell me. I got
to get rid of my duck boots.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, I've got mine too, And luckily there are other
brands that make duck boots, but not like llll Beans. No, though, sure,
I've got some Sperry's that are pretty good. Oh yeah, okay,
I like Sperry's, So there you go. And then lastly, Chuck,
I actually corresponded with a professor at Melbourne Business School
(41:14):
in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia about something. Yeah, and I did
that with Jill Klein. I found an article called why
we Boycott Consumer Motivations for boycott participation and it's from
all the way back in two thousand and four. But
I asked her, like, okay, is this does this still apply?
And she said yes, because these four motivators that the
study turned up were based on basic psychological processes that
(41:36):
are unlikely to change in twenty years. That's what she said, right,
So they found four motivators that are that are the
better predictors of whether somebody takes part in a boycott.
Do you want to hear them or should we just
end the episode here? Hey, it's up to you, Bun,
I'll go forward with them. One is egregiousness, That is
how badly a company behaved or how bad the thing
(41:59):
that the come any who supporting is efficacy, So the
person's judgment on whether the boycott's going to make any
difference whatsoever self enhancement is one. Is it going to
make them look good? Is it going to make them
feel good about themselves for doing it? And then estimated
participation of others. So the more people you have joining in,
the more the person is likely to join in, which
(42:20):
I call the cool mode effect.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
It's a good thing I got here because I know
for a fact she rolled that up, put it in
a bottle, corked it and threw it in the ocean.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
I couldn't believe how fast that current carried it here
in like twelve hours.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Pretty impressive, Pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
So thanks a lot doctor Jill Klein of Melbourne Business
School and her co author Andrew John, who also weighed
in on the email.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Thanks to everybody who helped us out with this, including Dave,
and thank you for listening to this episode, and since
I just thanked everybody, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
This is from a guy and Athens and this is
about our styrofoam. Hey guys, longtime listener. I run a
business over near Athens where we Athens Storture. That is
where we recycle ninety to ninety five percent of our waist.
We're primarily a candle company, but also have a quaint
retail store in downtown Monroe Nice where we make our
own products. When I started the business, I wanted ethical sourcing, sustainability,
(43:19):
and health to be our pillars of guidance. We source
all all of our materials from sustainable or recycled sources.
But we also have a huge recycling program where customers
can bring back their cleaned out old containers to be
exchanged for discounts on new products.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
That's awesome because those things are hard to clean out.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, totally. So he's been going to Charm, they have
one in Athens, because we mentioned Charm, the great recycling
center for hard to recycle materials here in Atlanta that
Emily is dedicated to. And they've been going to Charm
four years. And he said, since I know the industry
lacks some transparency. I've decided to ask one of the
folks what they do with low density plastic and styrofoam
(43:55):
that I drop off since I heard those things typically
have a low conversion rate into new material. And to
your pondering question from the episode about styroboam, the rep
told me they sell it to a company that actually
turns it into synthetic decking material, which I thought was
pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I love that, and thanks for all you do and
for being a good model of healthy friendship. Hey, hey,
how about that.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
What a great way to put it.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And that is for Matt at the Rekindle Candle Company,
and you can just look online. This sounds like great
stuff with a great core mission. So just check out
the Rekindle Candle Company online for Math and S Georgia
and buy their stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
That name is adorable, Matt, I love it. Yeah, thanks
a lot for the email, Thanks a lot for what
you're doing up there. I'm going to go check out
Rekindle Candle Company either online or on person who knows
And if you want to be like Matt and send
us a great email, you can do. So wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom and send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
pod tests, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just the two of us, and we
are doing an episode on boycotts today because boy boycott's
really sticking your crawl. Did a lot of them. They
seem to be overused in this era, and I wanted
to see how the whole thing worked, just from watching
(00:31):
them happen over and over again.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah. Well, you know Webster's defines a boycott as a
collective active refusal. Yeah, so does Steve, who help us
with this. But you know what we're talking about, right,
that's when people get together these days. Usually it's a
call on social media or something, and they say, hey,
we're not going to buy this thing from your store,
or we're not gonna buy anything from your store, or
(00:54):
we're not gonna buy anything from your company, or we're
not going to buy anything from your state or country
because we want to hit your bottom line, hitch in
the wallet.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
As they say, to get you to change.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, I mean to get you to change, or I think,
in some people's cases these days, just to be mean
because I hate what you stand for.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, so I want to say I'm not poop pooing
the entire concept of boycotts. What what I was taking
issue with is just how fast and loose they come,
over and over that if you really followed every boycott
like you had starve to death, there'd be nowhere you
could buy food any longer, let alone anything else.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, yeah, and can I quickly say also that these
sort of so many calls for these boycotts and social media,
they're also I feel like a lot of times like
just not thought out and that like you're boycotting this
one thing, but the same company owns this other thing
that you like, and they just seem to be kind
of the dumb version of boycotts.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, they're very knee jerk, they're not very organized, and
they're just emotionally driven. All boycotts have some level of
emotion and to them driving them, But there's also supposed
to be a lot more to them if you're gonna
make it successful.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah, and we're gonna cover all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But also one more thing, Chuck, I am also not
poopooing anybody caring about something that's great. I will always
promote somebody caring about something that's important to you, and
a lot of people show that they care by joining
in on boycotts or maybe even starting boycotts.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah. I mean you're known as the guy who cares.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Who's been calling me that the public at large.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I think that's your nickname on Reddit, the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Boy who cares and the best all around boy.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Oh man, look at that match made and heaven.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
The barb, the BHC and the barb.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So let's start talking about boycotts because, like I said,
I was curious in how they worked. We havesked David
help us with them. And what I didn't know right
out of the gate is that Boycott is somebody's last name.
The first guy whoever on record, got boycotted was named
Charles Cunningham Boycott.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah. That seems like something we would make up as
a bit, yeah, but it's actually totally true. He was
an Englishman living in Ireland and County Mayo, and he
was a rent collector, specifically would collect rent for absentee
British landlords from Irish tenant farmers who were having a
very rough time in eighteen seventy nine, down on.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Their luck, as you'd put it. There was a terrible famine.
This is after the Great Irish Potato famine, but this
one wasn't so wonderful either, And so these farmers were
not exactly looking forward to being evicted for being behind
on rent. And Boycott apparently seems to be one of
those people who had like he just followed the rules.
You're the one who's not paying your rent, so get out.
(03:44):
And the Irish people in County Mayo decided to do
something about it. They formed an organization called the Land League,
and they were agitating for fair rents. They were agitating
for an end to evictions, and Charles Boycott just kept
evicting people. So they're like, we've got to try something else.
What can we do. Let's do everything we can to
ruin Charles Boycott's life.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, and if there was only a name for this kind.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Of action, they're like, we'll get to that later, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
But we can't think of one. So later, in a
letter to the Times of London, Boycott basically kind of
summarize what they had been doing. And we're not going
to read all this word for word, but you know,
they really screwed with his business. He's you know, they
collected in crowds on his farm. They you know, would
harass him at his house. They threatened people that worked
(04:31):
for him, like his blacksmith apparently got a letter threatening
him with murder if he did any more work for him.
They threatened his laundress to stop washing his clothes, and
he couldn't get anybody to do any kind of work
for him, basically and ruined his business. It became a
big story, like not just there, but kind of internationally.
The British newspapers picked it up. The British newspapers also
(04:54):
raised funds to send fifty Northern Irish loyalists to harvest
his potato crop, because you could didn't get anyone to
do it because they were afraid they'd get you know,
physically beaten or harassed, and they were protected by British troops.
And apparently, by one account, it cost ten thousand pounds
to harvest five hundred pounds worth of potatoes from those
(05:14):
Northern Irish loyalists.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I did some conversions, let's hear it. So if they
spent ten thousand pounds sterling to harvest these potatoes, they
spent a million pounds sterling or one point four million
dollars in today's money to harvest fifty two thousand pounds
sterling or seventy thousand dollars worth of potatoes. Isn't that insane?
(05:38):
That really just drives it home. That's why I do
those conversions, Yeah, because I want to drive at home.
How nuts?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That was totally nuts. He left Ireland boycott did in disgrace.
It was a very successful challenge to his authority. Can't
call it a boycott yet, but you could very soon
because American journalist James Redpath said, you know what, the
first person who used that as a verb was a
local priest, believe it or not. His name was Father O'Malley,
(06:06):
who said, I believe he suggested the land League try
the same thing on another landlord named Brown, and he said,
let's do what they did to boycott. Let's do a
boycott on this Brown. That's what we're gonna do. We're
going to boycott Brown. See the word is a verb,
it's boycott. You understand.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
That was a great father O'Malley.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, And so just by covering father O'Malley using it
as a verb. Writing about these new boycotts, James Redpath,
who appears to have been a contemporaryaneous journalist to this time.
He kind of helped generate this idea that you could
actually get stuff done by boycotting. People check this out.
(06:51):
And so I think in the next year there are
more than a thousand boycotts in Ireland without social media.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, there were thousand boycotts, and that means father O'Malley
one hundred thousand times said, remember it's called boycotten.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
That is so good. We're going to get two emails
from people who aren't even Irish that are mad at
us for doing that. Yeah, and then fifteen emails from
people from Ireland who are like that was a hilarious
chuck totally, that's how it goes.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and maybe one from father a father O'Malley, because
I know there's a bunch of them.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Ye, I'm going to say, that doesn't narrow it down
at all.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
So yeah, that's where the whole boycott got started in
County Mayo, Ireland. And since then people have studied these
things and have really kind of gotten down to almost
the science what it would take to make a boycott effective,
and there have been a lot of effective boycotts over
the years. We're going to talk about some of them,
(07:50):
but to just kind of pull apart the nuts in
the bolts. There's just a handful of things that you
really have to do just right, and then it's sprinkle
it with a little bit of luck and you could
have an effective boycott on your hands.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
I think you meant just a little bit of luck.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, a little bit of leper kind.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Dust right, Yeah, for sure. These are the one, two, three, four,
five six things you need to do. If you you know,
you can boycott your day away. But if you want
to really be effective these there at least i'd say
probably four out of six of these need to be around.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah. Six steps to ruining target's market share.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You gotta have a clear goal in mine, which means
you have an outcome in mind. Basically m hm. You
want to narrow target. So you want to either target
like a very narrow like a product or just a
single company. H That's why sometimes when I think about like, yeah,
you're targeting this company, but like the parent company isn't targeted.
I don't know. That's where it can get a little messy.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
I think, yeah, and poor targets, Like can you guys
stop using the word target when you're talking about boycotts.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Uh, there's also awareness and education, because your your goal
here is to not only getting them to change whatever
they're doing, but to bring awareness and educate people and
whatever you feel like they're doing wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Well. Plus also the more support you have, the better
off you are.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, yeah, good point.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
You also want to reach core customers. This is a
very important point.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
They've turned up an expert in boycotts and studying boycotts
who said, essentially, if you have a bunch of PEDA
members who are boycotting Kentucky Fried Chicken, like, that's not
going to have much an effect because none of those
PEDA members were ever buying Kentucky Fried Chicken in the
first place. And yeah, maybe you could generate some public sympathy,
but you're not getting to their core customers necessarily. Yeah,
(09:37):
and that's what makes it effective.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
What else, Yeah, Uh, there's sustain Uh, there's substitutability. This
is a big one, because if you can very easily
switch to another brand of whatever, then it's going to
make your boycott far more effective. Like if then you know,
we'll get to other examples later. But like you know,
with the big blood Light boycott was a very big
(09:59):
and we're going to cover later. It was really easy
for the people who wanted a boycott by light to
switch to another, like an expensive light beer. So that
was a pretty effective boycott because it's like super easy. Yeah,
I'll just drink Miller Led or whatever, right.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Or I'll go to churches or Popeyes rather than Kentucky
Fried Chicken exactly. And then also like if you want
a successful boycott, you have to really like nail in
that bottom line. You really got to hurt the company
financially if you want to make them at least start
listening to you, if not actually enact the change that
(10:33):
you're looking for. And you know, in times past, essentially
pre social media era, that was the one measure of boycotts,
that is how you got a company to respond. You
started really affecting either their sales or their stock price,
and more and more often than not their stock price. Nowadays,
because of social media, bad press can spread so fast
(10:56):
and so far and so wide that just getting like
negative press can actually make large corporations or organizations change
their stance on something or make them drop their stance
in total.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, for sure, that's a very good point. It's a
little bit different ballgame these days. Should we take our break? Yeah,
all right, we'll take a break. We'll be right back
to as promised, talk about some of the most famous
boycotts throughout history. All right, we're back in this promise.
(11:55):
We're gonna take you on a little walk through the
history of boycotts. And we got to start with Colonial
because they were good at it. A lot of times
they were boycotting an act that was passed by the
British that they did not like. Over here in the
New Colonies. They had some pretty wicked branding with slogans
like no taxation without representation. They were pretty good at
(12:17):
that kind of thing. And the first one we're going
to talk about is seventeen sixty five. I know we've
talked about, you know, all these kind of here and
there in the life of the show. But the Stamp
Act was passed in sixty five, which was a tax
on paper goods and documents and things like that, and
the merchants in Boston and New York said, nope, we're
going to sign a non importation agreement and we're not
(12:40):
going to import goods from England anymore. And it worked
about a year later, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, first boycott and the we should say the American colonies.
It could see our Australian and New Zealand listeners. Good,
I don't remember any of this, what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Yeah, lots of colonies.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This happened in the American colonies, right, that's right. Shortly
after that, so Parliament's trying to pay for the Seven
Years War, the French Indian Wars, what the American colonists
called it. So they were then now directly taxing the
American colonies, and they followed up with the Stamp Act
with the Townsend Revenue Act in seventeen sixty seven. It
(13:16):
taxed a bunch of different stuff. The colonists organized a
bunch of protests and boycotts again, and Parliament responded and
they repealed the Townsend Act three years later, but they
kept one part of it. They kept a tax on tea.
Everyone loved tea in the American colonies, as I'm sure
in Australia and New Zealand too at the time. So
(13:37):
it was a big deal to have this big tax
on tea. And so the American colonists said, well, we're
not going to drink British tea, and in Parliament said oh, yeah,
well get this. We're going to give the East India
Company basically free reign on selling below costs for tea,
so that even with this tax, it's going to cost
(13:58):
you less for tea than buying this smuggled illegal tea
that normally is cheaper with the tax.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
So some merchants were like, well, it sounds kind of
good to me. I can make more money. And the
people here in the American colonies we call the patriots,
the founding fathers said nay to that, and that actually
led to the Boston Tea Party.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, the Sons of Liberty said no, thanks for get
a demputee in the Hobba.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Wow. I mean, you are killing it today all over
the place.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And that's what they did. In seventeen seventy four of
the First Continental Congress passed a colony wide ban on
all trade with Britain. And that was the beginning of
what would become a war.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, it worked then, it worked later And I mean
they didn't have a name for this because this was
before the County Mayo Boycott's and Charles Boycott. But they
were like this unnamed thing that we're doing. It really
kind of works, and so it inspired other groups that
came along in America over the court. So the coming centuries,
(15:01):
especially if you were part of a civil rights organization,
boycotts proved very effective. They are really worthwhile to do
because most of the time, if you're agitating for civil rights,
you have a group of true believers who are willing
to actually work at this. And one of the first
(15:22):
groups fighting for civil rights in the United States were
the Quakers Quaker abolitionists, and they formed something called the
Free Produce Movement.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, this was in the eighteen forties through the Civil
War basically, and they boycotted goods made by enslaved people,
cotton of course being one of the keys there. And
as far as they were concerned, like, hey, if you're
buying the stuff, you're supporting slavery. So the Free Produce
Movement sort of tackled that. Another obvious example as far
as civil rights go is the great Montgomery bus Boycott,
(15:54):
which we covered in detail in our episode from February
twenty eighteen. Rosa Parks colon Asient of Change, So you
can go listen to that episode for the full rundown
of the Montgomery bus boycott. But that was a couple
of highlights for me was the fact that before Rosa
Parks came along. I always want a chance to shout
out fifteen year old Claudette Colvin who in March nineteen
(16:17):
fifty five refused to move so a white passenger could
take her seat. She was also yanked off the bus
and arrested by the cops. But they would end up
rallying around Rosa Parks instead about nine months later. And
then the other thing I just wanted to highlight, and
again you should listen to that episode because it's really
in depth, but was that the black community rallied around
(16:38):
each other in like a big way, Like black taxi
drivers would charged the same fare as the bus fair
would be. They had volunteers organizing carpools. They had shoe
drives because people were walking so much, they were wearing
their shoes out to get people in fresh shoes. And
it's a really beautiful moment in American history.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, and it was a real struggle for them because
this is how black people in Montgomery largely got around
was the bus. So to give that up was a
big deal, and it was a successful boycott. It lasted
three hundred and eighty two days until the Supreme Court
ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. If your boycott
leads to a Supreme Court ruling that what you're fighting
(17:18):
against is unconstitutional, that is a successful boycott, Yeah, for sure.
And then one other thing about the Montgomery bus boycott
is that it directly inspired another boycott a few years
later that involved the United farm Workers grapegrowers or grape harvesters.
I should say that was led by Caesar Chavez, and
I mean one of the things that he did that
(17:40):
also makes boycott successful that we talked about was educating
the public. They created bumper stickers that said uvas, no,
no grapes. They told people what was going on, and
they got public support. That really helped these boycotts really
helped put the pressure on the grape growers to give
the grape harvesters better work and can nditions.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Can we talk about apartheid?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I think we should so.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Apartheid was segregation in South Africa. It was their version
of legal segregation of their people of the white minority
and the black majority in South Africa, and it was
around since nineteen forty eight through basically the mid nineties
to when it finally dissolved, I think was like ninety four.
(18:25):
And the repeal of apartheid is partially credited to international pressure,
Boycott's sanctions, divestment and little Stevie van zandt Yeah, and
little Stevie VanZant. We'll get to him in a sec
But the nonviolent protests were a big part of it,
led by the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela was one
(18:45):
of the leaders in the ANC. So in nineteen fifty nine,
A and C president Albert Luthuli said, Hey, great Britain,
why don't you boycatt all South American produce, all South
African produce the first time they kind of reached out
Internet for help like that, and so South Africa said,
you know what, we're outlawing the ANC and Nelson Mandela,
(19:07):
you're going to jail.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, yeah, for suggesting a boycott, not even staging a boycott,
but suggesting one. The UN got involved in nineteen sixty
two and they were like, hey, guys, this is not okay.
We all or you guys need to start breaking ties
with South Africa, And everybody said nuts to that. And
it took a bunch of different sports organizations to finally
(19:30):
get the public aware of it and hence getting governments
involved in doing something about dismantling apartheid by turning their
backs in South Africa. And the first sports organization to
cut ties without South Africa in protests of its apartheid
policies was the International Table Tennis Federation, who did so
all the way back in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Pretty great. Yeah, I love that. In sixty four the
IOC committee said no South African teams can participate in
the Olympics. Yeah, and that was a band that lasted
from sixty four to ninety two, so very long standing.
There were boycott's in Britain when South African cricket and
rugby teams which were there.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, there was a very famous Battle for Swansea, I think,
where there was like a rugby protest that the cops
and some hooligans started beating up and it just became
a huge thing and made international news too.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah. I mean I remember all this stuff growing up
in the eighties. It was all over the news. You
couldn't like, you couldn't like go ten minutes without hearing
the word apartheid or anti apartheid.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
I mean I knew the President of South Africa's name
as like a ten year old, because what was it,
fw de Clerk.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, you're like I knew it at ten. I don't
know that.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
No, I'm almost positive that.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah it was, I remember to Clerk.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yet I learned about it from Mad magazine.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Of course, the eighties is also when you got college
kids involved in that. You know, if you want to
get college kids on your side, that's a pretty smart
thing to do, because they got nothing else to do,
take like a couple of classes a day maybe, And
so they got together, started their activism on campus, and
(21:08):
more than one hundred and fifty US colleges divested from
South Africa, so they withdrew investments in South African companies
as institutions as a whole. That was a un cultural boycott,
and part of that ended up being something and started
in eighty five called the Artist United Against Apartheid, founded
by Little Stephen van Zant of the EA Street Band
(21:29):
and a producer named Arthur Baker, who organized a song
sun City and an album sun City because sun City
was a luxury resort in Casino in South Africa that
had a lot of big time concerts, and the song
basically was I Ain't going to play sun City and
it was a you know, it was sort of on
the heels of We Are the World, but this one
(21:50):
was different because they you know, there were certainly black
artists on We Are the World, but not rap and
hip hop, and Sun City had Bono of course, and
Bob Dylan and Ringo and Bruce of course, Pat Benatar,
George Clinton, Joey Ramon in a very weird appearance, Hall
and Oates, but not together. They were very much separated.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
It is so sad to me.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Lou Reid also had a very funny appearance Bonnie Rate.
But you also had run DMC and Cool Mode, the
Fat Boys, DJ Cool Hirk, Grandmaster, Melly Mel, Jimmy Cliff
was in there. So it really blended genres in a
way that We Are the World did not, and it
was a pretty good song. I think it is very eighties.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
It's definitely worth seeing the video for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think they ended up raising
like a million bucks, so not a lot of money,
but awareness is probably one of the biggest things because
a lot of artists would not play sun City, but
artists did very famously. There's a list the Beach Boys did, Share,
did Linda Ronstadt, did Sinatra? Did e Liza Minelli, Rod
Stewart very disappointingly, Elton John Queen and Dolly Parton call
(22:58):
played sun City.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
And Dolly oh. You know, so it was fairly heartbreaking
to read that, Yeah, because this wasn't like a oh
I hadn't heard kind of thing. This was like, I
don't care enough, I'm going to go to Sun City.
They're paying me a bunch of money to go to
this one concert date that I could easily cancel, you.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Know, yeah, agreed. Supposedly, I'm not even going to say
in their defense because I don't really know what they
were thinking, But supposedly they were told by the people
at sun City, like, hey, there's an exception for us,
and we can actually have a segregated audience, so like
you should come play. So I don't know if that's
the guys they did in under or not. That's the list.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah. So yeah, so this is a big deal. Like
sports entertainment, that's a really good way to get your
boycott spread far and wide, because that's what the average
person is paying attention to more than like the news
or foreign policy. They're like, wait a minute, why is
cool Mode not going to South Africa? I should probably
look into that. And so when you get people into it,
(23:57):
things actually happen. Right there was the US Congress passed
the Comprehensive Anti Aparthepe Act, and it was one of
the more putative sanctions packages the America has ever dealt
against any country. And Ronald Reagan even vetoed it and
Congress overrode his veto. Was the first time in thirteen
(24:19):
years that Congress had overridden a presidential veto, and they said, no,
this is getting passed, and so it did get passed.
And you know, you might be like, wow, that was
brave and assertive of Congress. They must really have cared
about dismantling apartheid, and I'm sure some of them did.
But I think what it says more than anything is
just how far and wide America was anti apartheid by
(24:41):
this time. That Congress is like, we're going to override
a presidential veto of the most popular president America's had
in recent history, because all of our constituents.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Are like, go do that, yeah, because they read about
cool mode. Yeah, they wouldn't have it, yep. Yeah. And
you know a lot of time, when the US does something,
the world follows back then at least, and once the
US put their sanctions in place, other countries came aboard
in Europe and Asia, and a lot of economic pressure
was put on South Africa and Mandela was Eventually the
(25:13):
Berlin Wall fell in eighty nine, which basically said South
Africa is not like a protection against communism in Africa, now,
no need for that. Mandela was freed ninety and then
over the next four years it was kind of little
by little dismantled. I think finally ninety four it was
when it was officially over.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So that was successful, ful, I would say, for sure.
There was another one that was pretty successful that was
much more recent. Back in twenty sixteen, in North Carolina,
they passed the Public Facilities, Privacy and Security Act, much
more well known as the Bathroom Bill, which basically said
that in North Carolina, you have to use a public
restroom for the sex that you were assigned at birth.
(25:51):
So essentially it's like trans people, you can't use public
restrooms that you identify with. People call it mean spirited,
evil it was anti trains, It was an attack on
a group of people, and it really it kind of
took off. It became one of the first really viral
boycotts on social media back in twenty sixteen. It had
(26:12):
a huge effect.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, and this was one where hitting in the wallet
was a big deal because corporations got involved. PayPal cancel
plans to build an office in Charlotte. You know, entertainers
got involved. The course, Springsteen as always the Boss wouldn't
play in sun City or Greensboro.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Ain't gonna played Greensboro.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And then of course a lot of other bands said
what the Boss does we follow movie studios pulled out,
which hit them in the financial pocketbook. Of course, said
we're not going to shoot there. Sports again gets involved.
The NCAA moved several different college championships out in North Carolina.
The NBA threat to pull the All Star Weekend out
of Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
They followed two They moved it to New Orleans that year.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Yeah, so all this told cost of the state of
North Carolina three point seven six billion dollars in the
year that that bill was around. They repealed it in
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Man, that's crazy that's a lot of money to lose
in just a year.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Chuck, And that's why it was effective.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
So you want to take a break and come back
and talk about whether social media boycotts are effective, let's
do it. Okay. So we're back, and we have entered
(27:47):
a brand new age of boycotts. Thanks to social media.
It is really easy to start a boycott, for a
boycott to go viral, and then for the news to
report on boycott's and how they did. It's almost it's
like a spectator sport to a certain extent. Oh, here's
this new boycott how to do? Two months on, I
saw an article on Newsweek and the title was, here
(28:09):
are the corporations being boycotted in June. It's just become
that like pedestrian.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, I mean, we should read this one stat there's
one study that found that fifty four percent of top
brands more than half have been boycotted, huh, and forty
two percent of multinational corporations. And we're not saying like
poor multinational corporations, but just sort of driving home the
point like you were saying that. I mean, you said,
you know, two months later, we'll see how it's doing.
(28:36):
Two months later, people might be like, oh, are we
boycotting that still?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I thought that was done. I thought we'd moved on,
which is kind.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Of the one of the problems with the social media boycotts.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It is because with social media, I mean by definition,
it's your attention span is just careening from place to
place constantly. It's really hard to stop and focus. And
that's a big thing that boycotts require, his focus, dedication,
organization growth. When you know two, yeah, when three quarters
(29:05):
of the people who are boycotting with you the first
week moved on to something else, your boycott's hurting, right.
But that is not to say that boycotts starting on
social media aren't effective. And there's a couple in very
recent memory that you can use to show how what's
effective and what isn't effective, because that's what people like
(29:25):
to do with boycotts these days. Talk about that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, And we should also point out that you're going
to hear another word in describing these things. It's a
word bycott, and that is the counter to boycott. When
because most of these are or political in nature, obviously
hot button issues and evenly sort of divided because the
United States is pretty much evenly divided at the point
politically down.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
To a guiding Eugene who votes twice for one freach party,
just to be fair. That's how divided America is.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, So when there is a boycott, there is also
generally a bycot when the other part of the country says, oh, yeah,
well I'm going to buy that thing because you don't
want to buy that thing, because we like what they're saying. So,
Goya is a very popular Hispanic food brand here in
the US. Great black beans. I love this Goya black beans, Goya,
that's right. In twenty twenty, it was big news when
(30:19):
the CEO of Goya attended an event at the White
House and was praising Donald Trump, and a lot of
people got upset about that, and Democratic Representative Alexandria Acasio
Cartes said, hey, we need a boycott Goya. And it
turns out that that didn't work so well because it
didn't hit enough of those things that you need to
(30:39):
do to have a successful.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Boycott, and also because AOC is a bycot magnet for sure.
So there were a couple of things. So there was
a The boycott sparked a bycot among conservatives because in
the United States. For those of you who don't live here,
when you choose a side on a boycott, you're defending
your political beliefs. That's just how they work here. I'm
(31:03):
not sure if it's like that the rest of the
world around, but that is definitely how they work here.
And the reasons that Goya wasn't successful as a buy
or as a boycott was because there are a lot
of people Latin Hispanic households who did not have a
dog in that fight, who did not choose sides, who
were not like, what are you talking about? We buy
Goya products, like this doesn't make any sense. And then
(31:25):
a lot of those households also are conservatives too, so
they probably would have bought Goya products had they not
been buying them already, just to show their support.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, and the bycot that it triggered, apparently Goya got
a twenty two percent bump in sales because of that bycot,
but it did not last long because, like you said,
a lot of those people who were like, yeah, I'm
gonna start buying Goya stuff because this guy praised Donald Trump,
they weren't Goya customers before. So maybe sometimes you get
(31:54):
someone from a bycot that's like, hey, these black beans
are dynamite. That that's my brand from now on. But
in this case, it was a quick bump in sales
and then they were like nope, back to old l
Paso and those sales kind of leveled out.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yes, that's actually on the if you flip flop the
political spectrum. The same thing happened to Nike not too
many years ago when they supported Colin Kaepernick while he
was taking a knee during the national anthem, and there
was a huge backlash on social media against Nike for
supporting him. Their people were burning their Nikes and making
(32:31):
videos of it, posting it on social media. But it
spurred a bycot to support Nike, and Nike made out
like bandits for that. They had what analysts suspect was
an additional six billion dollars in sale in a handful
of weeks following the boycott. The call for the boycott,
(32:52):
the buycot gave them that much extra money. The support
came out for them like that.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
That's right. Then the NFL got back at Colin Kapernick
by essentially blackballing him.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah, so we should probably mention.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Bud Light because we mentioned it earlier. That was another
very recent one. In twenty twenty three, transgender influencer Dylan
mulvaney had a TikTok video announcing a contest sponsored by
bud Light, and in that video had the nerve to
show a can of bud Light that the company center
with an image of her face on it. And that
was it. The conservative right got up in arms and
(33:26):
they said bud Light is dead to us, Go woke,
go broke. And in the three months following that post
bud Light sales went down twenty eight percent compared to
the same period in prior years, and the damage was
worse in Republican leaning districts I think thirty two percent
compared to twenty two percent in Democrat districts.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah, but ultimately overall, eight months after the initial boycott
they were down thirty two percent overall in sales.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, So I mean it was a successful boycott by
all accounts.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Man, they went berserk about that. It was a big
deal here in the US, that bud Light. So just
to be clear, they sent Dylan mulvaney one can with
Dylan Mulvaney's face on it. This was not for sale
or anything like that, but that was all it took.
And yeah, bud Light just took a beating. They were
(34:17):
the number one selling beer. I don't even think just
light beer, I think beer in the United States. And
they dropped down. They dropped down to third in just
a few weeks. Right. The reason why, there are a
few reasons why substitutability. You could easily just switch to
Corslight Miller's Light, and your tastebuds would have no idea
that you'd switched. But apparently a lot of people switched
(34:40):
to MODELO Especial, which we'll get to in a second.
And then also, and this explains why bud Light did this,
because in retrospect, you're like, that was one of the
more tone deaf things that a brand has ever done.
But it turns out bud Light's customer base is pretty
evenly divided along the political spectrum. So I think they
just thought like they were doing what they do and
(35:02):
we're clearly not expecting that kind of backlash. Companies in
that situation are much more vulnerable to a backlash when
they take any kind of political stance or social stance.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, like when it's a pretty even split on who
likes your product, exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, because I mean if it were all like if
bud Light's entire customer base were LGBTQ, they put if
they had Dylan mulvany be like a brand ambassador, it
would not matter at all. But because half of their
people probably have unflattering views on trans people, yes, it
really put a herding on them. And then the last
one was observability is what they call it.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, sometimes you consume a product in private, like the
black beans you're eating.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Right out of the can.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, you're not just walking around eating a can of
black beans in public. But other stuff, you know, it's
a little more visible and like you know, tailgating and
being out in public with a beer, being in a
bar with a beer, it's a much more public product
that you're consuming. And researchers found that even if you
were liberal and you were a beer drinker, you might
have avoided drinking bud Light in public just because of
the controversy over it.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
One of the big there's an ironic twist I guess
to this whole thing. I said that MODELO Especial became
I think the number one selling beer after bud Light
dropped off in the couple weeks after the boycott started
against bud Light, Modello's sales went up thirty six million
dollars more than bud light sales.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, so Modello is like, this is great. The thing
is is Modello and bud Light are both owned and
distributed by the same companies, So it was like robbing
Peter to pay Paul, or a Twitter user put it.
I think I found this on Vox maybe in an
article by Stephanie grob Plante. It was like boycotting the
Big Mac by eating a quarter pounder instead.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Yeah, and that's kind of what I was talking about
earlier with just I think boycotts are just not thought
through as much these days because I don't know, there's
so many mega companies that own all these smaller things.
You really got to do your homework to figure out, like,
wait a minute, I can't switch to this thing because
they're also owned by that thing.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah. I think though that one's not the most slammed
dunk ironic twist there is, because I think even if
they knew that it was the same general company Anheuser Busch,
the iyer was directed at bud Light. They wanted to
punish bud Light the brand specifically.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, and they were definitely successful with that.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah. Good point.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
So, Chuck, there's a couple of things. I think we
should wrap it up by talking about, like whether these
things are worth doing, whether companies should take a social stance.
Let's do that, shall we?
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, we mentioned earlier that
it doesn't necessarily have to be the big financial hit
to cause the problem these days, just the bad press
and then a negative press can hurt a company's reputation.
That could potentially hurt a stock price, but I mean, really,
the only thing that's going to damage the stock price
or bad sales. So at the end of the day,
(38:05):
it kind of is money. They can probably withstand bad press,
but they don't love it.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
No, But if you can turn the markets on the company,
that's a big deal.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah for sure. As far as whether people think companies
should get involved with this, it depends on who you asked.
There was a survey I think from twenty seventeen, is
that right, Mm hmm, yeah, not too long ago. It's
found that ninety percent of American consumers expect companies to
take an active role in addressing social concerns. There was
a different survey that found that sixty three percent of
(38:36):
millennials and sixty percent of gen xers I think companies
have a more important role than governments do in driving
social change. So those are pretty disparate numbers.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Right, And people who advise companies, like there's an entire
industry on advising companies on stuff like this. They say
it comes down to the company culture. Do you stand
for things? Is are you the kind of company that
would ever stand for anything? Or are you just trying
to sell duck boots? You know, you have to ask
yourself these kind of things. Do you want to change
to be a different kind of company? Who knows. But
(39:07):
one of the things that they find is that it
is often worse to take a stand and then change
your stance than to take your stance at all, like
Target's wishy washy stance on DEI policies, right or Apparently
Another big one is companies will celebrate Pride Month in
a country that's that where Pride Month is much more acceptable,
(39:29):
they and then just not celebrate it in other countries
where there is Pride Month but it's not quite as
accepted as it is in the other countries. So having
like a wishy washy stance on stuff that can really
damage your company's image because if you basically are telling
the world like, we don't really actually have any values,
we don't really care about anything social, We're just trying
(39:51):
to make money here. So even if you are a
company that chooses to take a stance, you really need
to stick with it and just stick with it did
or else just don't do it at all, but don't
make it take a stand and then backpedal.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Josh's advice to Corporate America, right.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
And then on the other side, if you're just an
everyday person and you want to take part in a boycott.
I think one of the issues, Chuck, that we kind
of were hinting around throughout this episode is that a
problem is that you can become complacent like you're doing
enough by you know, liking a tweet and then not
buying Kellogg's cereal for a week, and at the end
(40:30):
of the day you feel like you're doing your part
when you're really not doing much and there's a lot
more work to be done. That's kind of a big
danger of it, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I got to tell you, rand I'm very relieved because
a few minutes ago, I thought you were about to
say something about ll Bean. Nope, when you mentioned duck boots,
I was like, oh no, don't tell me. I got
to get rid of my duck boots.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, I've got mine too, And luckily there are other
brands that make duck boots, but not like llll Beans. No, though, sure,
I've got some Sperry's that are pretty good. Oh yeah, okay,
I like Sperry's, So there you go. And then lastly, Chuck,
I actually corresponded with a professor at Melbourne Business School
(41:14):
in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia about something. Yeah, and I did
that with Jill Klein. I found an article called why
we Boycott Consumer Motivations for boycott participation and it's from
all the way back in two thousand and four. But
I asked her, like, okay, is this does this still apply?
And she said yes, because these four motivators that the
study turned up were based on basic psychological processes that
(41:36):
are unlikely to change in twenty years. That's what she said, right,
So they found four motivators that are that are the
better predictors of whether somebody takes part in a boycott.
Do you want to hear them or should we just
end the episode here? Hey, it's up to you, Bun,
I'll go forward with them. One is egregiousness, That is
how badly a company behaved or how bad the thing
(41:59):
that the come any who supporting is efficacy, So the
person's judgment on whether the boycott's going to make any
difference whatsoever self enhancement is one. Is it going to
make them look good? Is it going to make them
feel good about themselves for doing it? And then estimated
participation of others. So the more people you have joining in,
the more the person is likely to join in, which
(42:20):
I call the cool mode effect.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
It's a good thing I got here because I know
for a fact she rolled that up, put it in
a bottle, corked it and threw it in the ocean.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
I couldn't believe how fast that current carried it here
in like twelve hours.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Pretty impressive, Pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
So thanks a lot doctor Jill Klein of Melbourne Business
School and her co author Andrew John, who also weighed
in on the email.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Thanks to everybody who helped us out with this, including Dave,
and thank you for listening to this episode, and since
I just thanked everybody, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
This is from a guy and Athens and this is
about our styrofoam. Hey guys, longtime listener. I run a
business over near Athens where we Athens Storture. That is
where we recycle ninety to ninety five percent of our waist.
We're primarily a candle company, but also have a quaint
retail store in downtown Monroe Nice where we make our
own products. When I started the business, I wanted ethical sourcing, sustainability,
(43:19):
and health to be our pillars of guidance. We source
all all of our materials from sustainable or recycled sources.
But we also have a huge recycling program where customers
can bring back their cleaned out old containers to be
exchanged for discounts on new products.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
That's awesome because those things are hard to clean out.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, totally. So he's been going to Charm, they have
one in Athens, because we mentioned Charm, the great recycling
center for hard to recycle materials here in Atlanta that
Emily is dedicated to. And they've been going to Charm
four years. And he said, since I know the industry
lacks some transparency. I've decided to ask one of the
folks what they do with low density plastic and styrofoam
(43:55):
that I drop off since I heard those things typically
have a low conversion rate into new material. And to
your pondering question from the episode about styroboam, the rep
told me they sell it to a company that actually
turns it into synthetic decking material, which I thought was
pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I love that, and thanks for all you do and
for being a good model of healthy friendship. Hey, hey,
how about that.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
What a great way to put it.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And that is for Matt at the Rekindle Candle Company,
and you can just look online. This sounds like great
stuff with a great core mission. So just check out
the Rekindle Candle Company online for Math and S Georgia
and buy their stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
That name is adorable, Matt, I love it. Yeah, thanks
a lot for the email, Thanks a lot for what
you're doing up there. I'm going to go check out
Rekindle Candle Company either online or on person who knows
And if you want to be like Matt and send
us a great email, you can do. So wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom and send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple
pod tests, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com