Patagonia Is Boycotting Facebook, Urges Other Companies to Do the Same
wsj.com
wsj.com
I don't like Facebook, and I refuse to use it on moral grounds. But I do want to patronize some of those businesses. Without at least basic knowledge of how to register a domain, build a website, etc... what options really exist for these places, especially at the "totally free" starting point of Facebook? I've often considered building a web app that serves as a non-programmer friendly frontend for a Jekyll blog/website hosted on GitHub Pages, since most of these places don't have super high requirements.
Wix? Squarespace? WordPress.com? All of these make purchasing a domain, and building a website very easy for the "average" business owner.
I recently made a website for my personal art projects - i got absolutely zero feedback. I’m sure many friends/family/random people have seen it now - but they’re not liking, sharing, or commenting anywhere that I can see so how am i supposed to feel that was effort well spent? If I made a facebook page, i’d get to see immediately who followed it - who likes it - who comments - etc.
Not to mention every time i put effort into adding content, i’d see some feedback for that.
If facebook is to be toppled, the feedback loop needs to be tightened for off-facebook content
Also - if these business owners are already spending time on FB and Instagram personally - it's less of a stretch to have a page there. Once they have a page - then they need convinced that they need a full-fledged site. And maybe a lot of them actually don't.
Some try to get away without the web page. But even if they have it, they need to get people to visit it. People searching for, say, a coffee shop will find you. But that can't match being shoved into the feed of somebody who says, "Hey, new coffee shop. I should try it."
Facebook, operated properly, is actually a pretty decent way to advertise within your community. It knows where people are and has at least some inkling of who might want a coffee/beer/tattoo.
Facebook isn't operated properly, along dozens of different lines. But a large subset of its users do still use it for that basic way of connecting to other people, including things that they might want but don't yet know about.
However, one big thing missing is like, free advertising, and communication.
With a website, people have to remember to come back. Or you can try email blasting them(annoying). With Facebook, you can just post your new wares and deals and followers see it in their feed.
Further, something I've noticed in other countries more than here, businesses will actually chat with you on Messenger. No need to email or call, just fire off a message and get a response.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like FB and don't have an account there, but I totally get why businesses do this, even if it costs them business from folks like me and you.
Especially since I feel like people visiting are more likely to pull on their map app to find local places to go to.
It is better to get some non-abusive Wix-like company to host you, but those have a non-zero start cost (there a re many of them). Looks like a price of zero on a service is only achievable through some customer abuse.
Just as an example, i have a facebook account with bogus info but i've had it for nearly fifteen years now. Over time, i've used it for chatting with friends, reconnecting with lost ones, buying and selling locally, finding events and even as a local rideshare.
No single platform can do all of this and despite the horrible things facebook does and enables, there is real value in their service.
Driving targeted local traffic to that website is a different matter. SEO is hard, takes time and money and technical know-how, and is not guaranteed to work. Search ads are expensive. Facebook and Instagram pages work perfectly for these small establishments.
There are a million businesses they could target as bad for the environment. Like, I don’t know, oil companies. Oil companies whose product they use to make their fleece.
Instead they go after a company that is moving to carbon neutrality, why? Because they don’t want to pay for advertising and would rather get free PR from the media, who also hates Facebook.
It is a PR strategy from Patagonia, but not necessarily for sales. For as long as Chouinard is steering the ship, Patagonia's goals are much broader than financial success.
Corporate activism frequently does seem to be a bit about PR but Patagonia is one of the best examples we have of it in practice.
Of course, my consumer choices are absolutely negligible and the most significant thing I can do by far is vote and advocate for the climate. Fussing over my consumer choices is penny-wise and pound foolish, and the fossil fuel industry and other polluters bank on convincing consumers that if they just buy the stuff with the faux burlap packaging the climate will be just fine.
Similarly, whether I use Twitter/etc or not won’t move the needle on the harm they do to our democracy. Systemic problems like these aren’t significantly altered by individual choices to partake or abstain—political intervention is required. And of course, comparing HN to Twitter and Facebook is just absurd.
And yet, aggregating over the populace, this mindset that "my choices are negligible (it's the non-climate-change-voting populace's consumption that's the problem), and it's penny-wise and pound foolish to focus on my choices" is actually penny-foolish and pound foolish. You (and I) are in fact yet another consumer they've convinced that our choices are "negligible".
the market has decided that FB is now the poster child for bad business behavior.
That is, it makes financial sense for (some) companies to disengage from the FB brand.
For a company whose business models rely on leveraging social network dynamics to sell more ads, it seems welcomingly ironic that FB should be labeled the social pariah, if even for a short moment in time.
(let's hope it sticks)
A good position to take from Patagonia, especially now after the rebrand to Meta and the change in direction they promised. If everything goes as Zuck is planning, we are in for a mighty bad rid; I hope something will be the stick in Meta's gears for the sake of humanity or that there's a way to stop Zuck's Metaverse phantasizing.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/business/patagonia-reopen...
Perhaps I'm a cynic, but this reads like 'mood affiliation' and a brand play to me. I doubt Mr. Gellert and Patagonia have a well-thought out perspective on hate speech/misinformation (if they do, please point me to it) and the complexities of even judging what it is and the myriad of considerations for whether/how to manage it. If I were to predict the 'socially conscious' positions they will take, I would guess it will align with those of their customers: higher socioeconomic status, urban, democrat-voting (but not necessarily liberal), college-educated, and mostly white people.
At the end of the day, they are a for-profit company, and want to remain attractive to their core customer base.
The "people over profits" bit is kind of rich, in my opinion. Given that Patagonia products have huge markups and are inaccessible to middle and lower class people due to their price. A big part of their brand is about a social status signal from wearing an upmarket brand. They depend on conspicuous consumption.
I say all this even as a Patagonia customer. I do like their products, but the proselytizing about issues without humility on how they themselves operate and the lack of consideration for the complexities of issues, is all a bit much.
Patagonia could (and used to) make their products in the US, sell them for the same prices, and still make a profit. They don't, and instead chose to outsource their manufacturing to countries where environmental regulations, even if they exist, are seldom enforced.
This is a canonical example of companies who embrace a veneer of social good piety, and under the surface are utterly hypocritical.
Most of the items in the brand are entirely, as you say, social status signals.
It's companies cutting ad budgets who were going to do it anyway.