As an activist community, LGBT people have been early adopters f new technology and strategies aimed at our target audience. So why do we continue to cling to a relic of the past that hasn’t worked for decades?
Boycotting a company or product was productive until the early 2000s, but its worth as a modern activist tool is over. As a society, we’ve evolved our corporate structures and distribution models to make it nearly impossible to meet the definition of a successful boycott.
Remember the outrage over Chick-fil-A donating sandwiches to an anti-gay group? How did that turn out for us? (Right wingers bought tons of chicken sandwiches and the company didn’t go out of business — it didn’t really affect their sales at all!) As a boycott, it was a bust.
I’ve been the lead loudmouth for the campaign to expose the Salvation Army’s anti-gay history for almost a decade. The piece that started it all was called Why You Shouldn’t Give to the Salvation Army, but nowhere in the blog post did I call for a boycott. Instead, I simply told people about the group’s history and let them make up their own mind on whether or not they wanted to chuck change into the red kettles. It was an informational campaign — not a boycott. After the post went viral, there was no way for the Salvation Army to put the genie back in the bottle.
The successful portion of the Chick-fil-A campaign came along the same lines. The company’s sales didn’t shrink enough to cause any real damage, but news that the company’s leadership was anti-gay made national headlines. Soon politicians, celebrities, and half of Facebook were talking about Chick-fil-A and how homophobic they are as a company. Again, the internet did our job for us. We didn’t need to point to declining sales as our goal post, but that’s how it was set up. It wasn’t a successful boycott, but it was an incredibly effective public-relations campaign.
The internet has helped LGBT people organize and push for civil rights at lightning speed compared to other civil rights struggles. We used that tool to come out, meet other members of our community, share information, and, most important of all, organize ourselves. Who would want to go back to the days of local phone trees when you can send an email to everyone at the same time?
Our community is too small to put a big dent in any major multi-national corporation’s bottom line, but we can definitely put a dark spot on their reputation. With social media tools in hand, we can bring any organization to its knees by simply sharing the information they don’t want the public to see. Companies can wait for a boycott to sputter out, but in today’s world they have to respond to bad publicity immediately.
The Salvation Army started a major public relations push a couple of years ago to tell folks they’ve changed their ways. Chick-fil-A announced they would stop donating to anti-gay groups. Was it because they lost a fortune? No. They lost their good standing in the public eye — and that’s much more worrisome for any corporation. That is where we win.
This way, we get the same results, get a faster response, and gain allies along the way. Why should we position ourselves into a losing situation when there’s a better solution staring us in the face from our laptop and phone screens?
In the days of global trade and online shopping, boycotts are a thing of the past. It’s time to finally call off the boycotts and embrace modern PR campaigns.
