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THREAD: I'm an expert on activism to change businesses. The current hotel boycott in protest of Brunei's "stone LGBTQ people to death" law is worthwhile, but allow me to reveal how we can easily make boycotts like this way wAy WAAAAY more effective. #BoycottBrunei
2/ In case you've been living under a stone, Brunei has a terrible new law, and celebrities have organized a boycott of hotels that are owned by the Sultan of Brunei. buzzfeed.com/patricepeck/el…
3/ George Clooney is organizing this boycott, but the op-ed he wrote (deadline.com/2019/03/george…) calling for action simultaneously laments the limited impact of such a boycott...
4/ Clooney: "A couple of years ago two of those hotels in Los Angeles, The Bel-Air and The Beverly Hills Hotel were boycotted by many of us for Brunei’s treatment of the gay community. It was effective to a point...."
5/ "... But like all good intentions when the white heat of outrage moves on to the hundred other reasons to be outraged, the focus dies down and slowly these hotels get back to the business of business."
6/ This 2014 NYT story "Can a Hotel Boycott Change a Sultan’s Policy?" noted: "Industry experts, however, say past hotel protests [...] provide few clues as to the staying power of this boycott."
nytimes.com/2014/06/01/tra…
nytimes.com/2014/06/01/tra…
7/ This illustrates a few core weaknesses of the traditional boycott:
a) Public forgets about it
b) Temporary impact
c) Businesses anticipate (correctly) that impact will be temporary, so they are less likely to change
a) Public forgets about it
b) Temporary impact
c) Businesses anticipate (correctly) that impact will be temporary, so they are less likely to change
8/ Plus, to have any leverage in a boycott you need to prove you're either an actual customer (are you saving your receipts??) or a likely *potential* customers (are you saving receipts from OTHER luxury hotels??). Without that, you have no evidence of your economic significance.
9/ It would be VERY impactful to cancel an existing reservation, but even if you found 10,000 real customers of this hotel, how many of them would currently have reservations? 10? 50? The rest of the hotel's actual customers still have NO immediate way to inflict economic damage.
10/ You can tweet or write Yelp reviews, but for all they know you're just a Russian bot. An online mob DOES create a PR headache, but if you can't prove you're a REAL customer & they are ACTUALLY losing money, then you haven't unlocked your full power to drive lasting change.
11/ These problems SEEM impossible to solve, but they aren't. These are simply DATA PROBLEMS. Traditional boycotts lack data. Add the right data, and boycotts become 100x more effective. Here is some data that would make boycotts more effective at changing businesses:
12/
✅ How many verified customers are boycotting?
✅ How much did those customers spend before boycotting?
✅ Have those customers actually stopped spending money since they SAID they were boycotting?
✅ How much money has been lost specifically because of this boycott?
✅ How many verified customers are boycotting?
✅ How much did those customers spend before boycotting?
✅ Have those customers actually stopped spending money since they SAID they were boycotting?
✅ How much money has been lost specifically because of this boycott?
13/
✅ How long have these boycotts been going?
✅ Have these former customers starting spending more money at competing luxury hotels?
✅ If Brunei were to change their laws, how much money could these hotels expect to make in increased sales from the boycott ending?
✅ How long have these boycotts been going?
✅ Have these former customers starting spending more money at competing luxury hotels?
✅ If Brunei were to change their laws, how much money could these hotels expect to make in increased sales from the boycott ending?
14/ Businesses make decisions based on financial data. Traditional boycotts are weak because they don't provide financial data. A boycott which provided this information would be much more powerful.
15/ In the next tweet I will say something self-promotional, but it's OK because I will also share knowledge that you can use to empower yourself to permanently change the way capitalism works.
16/ My company @MoneyVoice has built the ultimate tool for "voting with your money." We make it easy to prove to businesses how much money they will lose when you boycott, and how much money they will gain if they do what you want them to do. wefunder.com/moneyvoice/
17/ Every time you make a purchase at any business, MoneyVoice gives you the right to vote for what you want that business to do. This app lets you send a message to businesses, but your message is MUCH more powerful because it includes PROOF that you are a valuable customer.
18/ Customers can use MoneyVoice to send a message to these hotels. When you do this, we can show the hotels proof of exactly how much money they're losing, and how much money they can make if they improve. I believe this can make future boycotts immeasurably more effective.
19/ We will also help solve the "temporary" nature of boycotts by making it easy for people to track which businesses they are boycotting, track the status, and automatically send reminders when people forget about a boycott and resume shopping at a business.
20/ You can try our app today, but before this will REALLY work we need to finish building our product for businesses. You are invited to invest, become a shareholder of MoneyVoice, and help us finish building this critical tool for voting with your money. wefunder.com/moneyvoice/
21/ OK, I got some feedback from @shannoncoulter, the leader of #GrabYourWallet, so I thought I'd add some more thoughts to this thread in response!
22/ Oh, I never said that traditional boycotts don't work, I believe they do! I'm not positioning what we're doing "against" them, I'm saying that I think our product is additive to what's already being done and I believe we can make boycotts a lot more effective.
23/ Looking at the Ivanka example, it seems pretty clear to me that you and the rest of us Grab Your Wallet supporters succeeded at putting Ivanka's company out of commission with the power of a boycott, and it seems clear that we collectively impacted sales.
24/ The Glamour piece affirms this, & cites numbers showing how sales dropped. I'm saying it could've been even more impactful if MoneyVoice had displayed a public, real-time dashboard of how sales were dropping at Nordstrom & other retailers among customers who cared about this.
25/ We could have provided proof that there was a sales drop that could be directly attributed to the boycott. With that data, more journalists may have written about it sooner, and w more confidence in the impact, and the causal relationship. Financial data ➡️ More brand impact.
26/ We also want to build a "following" feature so that every Grab Your Wallet supporter can follow the Grab Your Wallet account on MoneyVoice. Then, every time GYW has updated feedback (either positive or negative) for a brand, it can be pushed automatically to all supporters...
27/ ...who are verified customers at those companies. This would make it easier to usefully keep people engaged even if they aren't reading every tweet or checking the spreadsheet. And you can guarantee brands that if they DO change, all boycotting customers will all be informed.
28/ You said: "they don't work on a "financial data" level, but a brand one." I would say those two concepts are pretty intertwined. Most brand value is derived from the brand's ability to drive sales, right? I think both boycotts & MoneyVoice impact both brands & sales numbers.
29/ You mentioned research on the brand impact, which I'd be excited to see. I agree that there's no research showing that boycotts work on a "financial data" level. But perhaps that's simply because no one in history has ever done a data-rich boycott of the type I described?
30/ Do you agree that adding the sort of data we can provide would be additive and potentially increase the impact? Or do you see any wild-card drawbacks, perhaps due to how PR teams would react to the public disclosure of this sort of financial data?
