Jay D. answered • 05/01/19
Undergraduate Honors Student Majoring in French Secondary Ed.
I hope I'm not too late here. This is somewhat contentious, but I would argue that boycotts really aren't effective today, at least not in the United States. I believe this for several reasons.
The first and most significant reason is the recent development of the marketing strategy that Peter Coffin calls outrage-as-advertising. For example, think of Gillette, Nike, Tarte, or even McDonald's with that whole Szechuan sauce craze a while back. As traditional marketing strategies have become easier to ignore, and thus less effective, brands have started to try other ways to get the public's attention. So, when a company gets everyone to start talking about its controversial messages, practices, etc., it becomes much harder for people not to pay attention to that company. Basically, negative attention is still attention, which ultimately helps the implicated brand more than it hurts it.
The second reason why I think boycotts are no longer effective is the fact that consumption has become ubiquitous. If people need some product to live a comfortable life, then they'll generally keep buying it regardless of the ethics of its production or brand. You might counter that with, "Well, they can just buy from another, more ethical company!" The thing is, in this day and age, the market for any product is generally split between a handful of megacorporations that aren't necessarily any better than one another. Many large companies even have multiple subsidiary brands of the same product in order to create the illusion of competition. Plus, even when there are more ethical brands out there, they tend to be more expensive than the less scrupulous ones, which makes them inaccessible to many people.
Basically, the vast majority of people don't really have the choice to opt out of unethical consumption.
