Boycotts are one of the most effective methods consumers have to enact change.
While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.
Consumers "voting with their wallet" very seldom accomplishes much, except giving people a sense of having "done something".
That said, if companies and advertisers start publicly pulling support (like we see here, and the Mozilla story), it can start to raise internal flags, and (occasionally) lead to change.
While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
Social media companies would literally vanish if all the users stopped using them. What would actual users stand to lose? Event scheduling seems to be the main reason I read on here why people stay. There are soo many ways to do that - it would not be a hardship on users if they view the social gain of #deletefacebook.
Target/Sears vanished in Canada because enough of us did vote with the wallets.
Facebook is just another company, with the difference that a lot of powerfull people now wants them gone.
Pretty sure target didn't shut down in Canada over boycotts.
The other companies getting involved are a result of the boycott and the attention driven by it, so that's just a mechanism of the effect of boycott's, not an indication that they lack effect.
And even if they are weak, that doesn't mean they aren't one of the most effective mechanisms consumers, as such, have to effect change: that would only be rebutted by the presence of demonstrably more effective methods available to consumers.
> While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
Outside of direct democracy systems (including limited direct democracies, like representative systems where citizens retain the power of initiative), legislation isn't a power of the people generally, but a power that the people can indirectly influence by other means. And citizen influence campaigns against government (especially when there are entrenched interests opposed) are not notably more efficacious than boycotts against businesses. (Indeed, boycotts against businesses are often resorted to -- and sometimes successful in producing legislative changes -- after conventional citizen activism directed at legislative change without boycotts fails.)
Boycotts might not acheive much, but there is a much broader class of consuemers voting with their wallet and we usually just call it market forces.
The point still stands. Voting with your wallet doesn't work for any meaningful interpretation of the word "voting".
I think that made a single-digit dent in their revenue.
Politics and law enforcement are far better tools to get corporations to behave. They solve the coordination problem, they can far easier track changing and long chains of ownership, and they allow you to delegate the research work to someone you trust.
One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?
The second is indirect outcomes, where the bad actor and the boycott-ee are different. If you threaten a purchaser over a supplier, or a supplier over a purchaser, they can hope to change behavior with no major loss of revenue. It's a very different situation than changing the actual bad behavior. (And in many of these cases the bad behavior was unchanged, some external company just dissociated from it.)
There do seem to be some solid successes there, for instance with product safety, food source sustainability, or sweatshop labor. But even there, I'm curious whether the threat of boycott was a primary influence compared to the other activist campaigns around it.
They feared legal intervention due to the public attention drawn by the boycott.
Affecting revenue of a targeted actor directly is not the only mechanism by which boycotts are intended to have an effect.
But what I'm questioning is "due to the public attention drawn by the boycott." Was the consumer boycott actually a major reason SeaWorld feared legal action?
When Blackfish came out, a lot of musicians cancelled planned SeaWorld concerts, which had a visible and immediate revenue impact. Share prices dropped 33%, even though revenue only dropped ~1%; presumably shareholders feared the possibility of legal action. And a range of state and federal Congressmen introduced bills on regarding orca captivity, explicitly citing Blackfish as a motivator.
Boycotts are certainly correlated with major corporate and legal changes, but I'm skeptical that they're a significant cause. Examples like SeaWorld make me think that boycotts and policy changes have common causes (e.g. Blackfish), but the boycotts aren't themselves very impactful.
The Chicago Tribune had a clever bit about the gun-seller boycotts, arguing that boycotts only matter as a way to keep the topic in the news, and it basically doesn't matter whether people actually participate. That's basically my guess, also.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/opinion/zorn/ct-persp...
Wikipedia also has a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts
The bus boycott in Alabama by MLK and others.
Boycotts can be an effective tool.
Nike boycott in the 1990s was really effective. The company’s sales fell in short them, but the damage to the brand was even more significant. Nike had to work a decade to repair the 'child labor' reputation and adopt the global sustainable idea.
On the other hand consumer boycotts against products without brand or network externalities have less effect. They suffer from free rider effect. Boycot is essentially subsidizing the consumption of those who use the boycotted product.
The grape boycott would suggest otherwise.
So, it seems to me that boycots (and protests) are important for convincing regulators something is an issue.