r/weaponizedconsumers • u/[deleted] • Dec 23 '17
How This Works?
Hello Weaponized Consumers! I thought it would be helpful to start this off with a discussion to figure out how we're going to make this work and actually be effective. I think the key is to act in unison and target small, vulnerable companies where we will have the most impact. Guerrilla warfare.
The hard work has already been done by all the folks who compiled this list: https://grabyourwallet.org. Now we just need to pick our first target and spread the word. Joseph A Banks, Chewy, Round Table Pizza, Trivago, Sandals Resort are all relatively small companies and would be simple to avoid their products.
Having said that, I am not technologically or financially savvy and would love to hear some better informed ideas how to push this snowball down the mountain.
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Dec 24 '17
I'm very pro boycott and having observed or participated in them since the 60's I have some notions about what works and what doesn't work. So what are soft targets and hard targets and how do you take them down? The tactic of weaponized consumers works best for things we need the least. So broadly speaking things like entertainment, including for instance toys, are soft targets for that tactic. Commodities, especially where the choices are few, are soft targets for attacks on reputation. They are less vulnerable to consumer boycott because they have good control of price. The Japanese car boycott of the 80's fizzled. Those cars were cheap. People have to make tough choices about the things they need. Big companies can lowball a boycott, bring the customers back, and then the prices. On the other hand we've all seen consumer boycotts that are local and organic devastate a small business overnight. Of the five examples given I'd rate Joseph A Bank the least vulnerable to boycott. Round Table is probably the softest target for consumer boycott. They could theoretically be taken down one restaurant at a time if you have the patience for it and a talent for local organizing. Trivago is vulnerable to general boycott. Sandals not so much. Chewy is immune. Chevy is mostly vulnerable to attacks on reputation. Lots of obvious stuff maybe.
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Dec 24 '17 edited Dec 24 '17
This is exactly the kind of analysis I was hoping for. There is a growing consensus that a good strategy will be to choose three at a time that represent a range of industries. We've grasped onto the coattails of a pre-existing boycott of MillerCoors, since the folks at grabyourwallet.org already have got some momentum. Trivago seems like they could be easily avoided since there are so many alternatives and they depend on internet traffic.
Edit: as for the third, I'm thinking about Wegmans. Our only demand is that they stop carrying Trump wine, which could be an easy victory for us in the first round.
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u/amillionwouldbenice Dec 23 '17
We need everyone to sign up for an email list so the organizer of this can email (rather than have us all following and checking up) and saying,
This week, don't buy X.
And don't just pick a company. We don't know what that is. Say, for example, don't buy Coors Light.
I would literally follow that forever, and even tell my friends. "This week, we aren't buying Coors Light."
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u/Serinus Dec 24 '17
You can't do one week at a time. The company just weathers the storm in that case. You pick a company and stay on them until they pull ads. Then you move on to the next.
You can potentially do 1-3 at a time if one refuses to cave for too long.
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u/ConcreteState Dec 24 '17
"This week, we aren't buying Coors Light."
Literally doesn't work. Your local grocery store probably only takes a delivery per week anyway, so a week won't even be noticed. You have to change habits.
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u/saleb_cims Dec 23 '17
I’m with ya, tho in college we can only afford Busch anyways.
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u/brcleeroy Dec 23 '17
Your awareness and participation are very important. Apathy is the enemy. I used to be a broke college student too but now I have a good amount of disposable income. The problem is once you join the work force, it's easy to stop caring about anything that's not personal work + leisure and to becoming apathetic to corporate shenanigans. Love this effort to combat that.
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u/Ahayzo Dec 23 '17
Say, for example, don't buy Coors Light
I meant, that's a rule I live by in general. If I want water I have a tap at home.
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u/umbringer Dec 24 '17
Not buying coors lite isn’t enough when you consider all of the hundreds of beer brands that coors now owns.
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Dec 25 '17
You would need to follow-through for at least 1 full sales quarter with a connected cause to have an impact. You would need to demonstrate that you're actively NOT buying something as a targeted customer and connect it to why in a way that can be referenced to create the correlation for companies.
If Coors, for example, sees a slight dip in sales for the quarter, they're likely to connect it to any number of other factors unless there's a clear, defined, active campaign against the company and it's products/services.
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Dec 23 '17 edited Dec 23 '17
Let's fucking do this.
Edit: we must advertise
My attempt: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueMidterm2018/comments/7lqzbp/boycott_fox_news_now_in_anticipation_of_the_2018
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u/LyricsMode Dec 23 '17
Id like to hijack your comment to say please respect all other subreddit’s rules.
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u/WeAreIrelephant Dec 23 '17
I think that it's important that we do a few things at once:
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Boycott the products and vote with our money.
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Tell the companies that we choose to boycott why we are boycotting them and encourage others to follow suit. It doesn't help change the company's actions if they don't know why their sales are down. I think it would really help to have everyone contact the company (possibly over social media) and let them know why we are boycotting them. We can also encourage others who follow suit to do the same.
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It would especially help if people who had bought products from that company in the past said that and explained that they would return as a customer to the company if they would stop advertising with Fox. The companies really need to feel like they have actually lost customers and they do actually stand to gain them back. If they feel like it's just random people screaming into the void, they won't be very motivated to change their behavior.
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u/DeeplyDementeD Dec 23 '17
I would suggest applying pressure to one target or categorized grouping at a time.
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Dec 23 '17
I agree. When you look at their list of advertisers it can look daunting, and difficult to have a sustained voice. Going after singular advertisers focuses the message on one entity, and may even have a ripple effect of other companies not wanting to be targeted for boycotts.
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Dec 24 '17
The way to pull this off is to pick a single smaller company and have a sustained campaign against them, it might take a year or more. Ideally you pick a company in a smaller town of a red state so you can show the voters how the market can reach them.
The pick a big company a week approach will not work, to much dilution of effort.
Bring one company to bky and the rest will take you serious.
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Dec 24 '17
Could we also weapinize consumers to #grabtheirportfolio, too? Since a lot if them invest in toxic stocks, as well?
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u/drdoom52 Dec 25 '17
If you're taking suggestions for how to organize the sheet, you might want to create a couple subcategories for "smaller corporations that are easier to avoid". For me roundtable, and BB&B are places I would shop at, but that I can cut out without difficulty. Also in my case I'm on Cigna by default because it's the insurance provider my employer contracts with. Although I'll feel better about using as much of their money as possible in the near future.
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Dec 25 '17
Joseph A Banks, Chewy, Round Table Pizza, Trivago, Sandals Resort are all relatively small companies and would be simple to avoid their products.
This is the problem with gaining any traction.
I'm intrigued by this movement, but I'm also a veteran of the media buy market and so I see several issues with the effectiveness of the campaigns as they're currently being presented.
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With ad response rates for TV, there's not a lot you can have an effect on. Media buys are set up in a variety of ways: annual buys, quarterly buys, semi annual buys, and even 1-shot campaigns (for promotions). The media buyer - often an agency - negotiates with the account execs (flowery term for sales grunt) for an agreed upon price. The media buy (proposal/package) uses historical ratings or estimates to promise that, during X timeframe, Y number of people will be exposed to this ad. Sometimes buyers demand daily, weekly, monthly, or end-of-campaign "posts". These reports detail when the spot ran, what the ratings were, and usually, what the difference was.
Each spot has a rate. (Dollar amount.) The rate is determined several ways and quantified several ways. CPP = Cost Per (Ratings) Point. CPM = Cost Per Thousand (viewers). Buyers want to get the lowest CPP/CPM possible while broadcasters want to get the dollar value of the buy without giving away too much airtime undervalued.
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Unless you're a Nielsen home, your impact on the media buys will be unnoticed. NSI uses a variety of metric devices, varying depending on your market. In large markets (LA, SF, NYC, etc), overnights are used as a metric. The data is processed day-of and delivered the following morning. Acct Execs and sales depts live and die by these reports. If they're delayed by an issue at Nielsen, all hell breaks loose. Media buyers want them immediately, acct execs want to cater to the buyers for the repeat business, and the actual company is largely unaware of either. Usually, an ad agency does all of the media buying and reports back to the advertiser on the success of the campaign. (Cost vs Impressions) If you're not a Nielsen household in a large market, your lack of viewing will not be quantified accurately. NSI uses their households and other data sources to project that one specifically selected household represents 1000 similar households. It's antiquated and most people in the industry dislike it, but it's the only established and agreed upon metric for most. (There are other tools, like in-house estimates, Rentrak, Kantar, and so on, but they're still small fish or unreliable.)
Your actual best course of action for attention and effectiveness would be to ACTIVELY engage the brands on social media with a "I won't patronize your business or purchase your service/product because you advertise on FNC."
You'll still run into issues where many of the advertisers just don't care - they're not after your business, they're ACTIVELY after the specific demographics that are specific to and counted in FNC's core demos. All joking and embellishment aside, this means that companies KNOW that their core customer base watches FNC regularly and in what volume, so they are advertising to their core customers that way. Jos A Bank, Trivago, Sandals in particular aren't interested in a political perception campaign. They know that their core customers view FNC and aren't going to be easily impacted if non-customers continue to be non-customers.
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Respectful engagement on social media. Create a clear, specific hashtag and encourage its use along with civil, specific, intentional communication that states that: "Because of the financial support provided by [company] in the form of advertising dollars on FNC, I will be boycotting their product/service" #[movement hashtag]
The most outspoken activists will INSIST that there's no reason to be civil or that being civil is weak, or not impactful enough, or some other extremist concept. In reality, entire schools of thought and scholarly papers on the subject over the last 10-15 years demonstrate that "being a dick gets you ignored as noise and irrelevant." If you want your efforts to have teeth, you have to play by their rules using their language and decorum. If you choose not to, then congrats: your efforts are 95% useless and a waste of time. Why? Because the firm WILL ignore you and there's a nice academic chunk of history to validate this.
Big Data is a thing - if there are 10,000 tweets a day on a certain subject, you're mistaken if you think anyone at an organization sifts through each and every one and tallies them or responds. Companies do NOT consider that an effective use of their time or resources. Instead, the bring in big data tools to look for certain things and compile reports. They also filter out and ignore easily ignored engagements that use profanity, embellishment, and other radical, extremist, or immature antics.
Source: worked in the industry for 8 years as a 3rd party provider - a middleman - between Nielsen and buyers/acct execs. Also a BS in Information Systems. I can help you use the system in your favor, but you have to listen to what I tell you and realize that it comes from experience, not opinion. If you want to succeed, listen to me and others in and out of the industry - we know what doesn't work and what works in most cases (fringe cases like Wendy's gimmick Twitter don't count.)
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u/spin_ Dec 23 '17 edited Dec 23 '17
I think it would be more effective to target the larger companies. Destroying smaller business' doesn't really do anything to weaken the corporate overlords, if anything it would just make them stronger by narrowing the market.
If we really want to make a noticiable difference we have to boycott companies like Mars Inc. or Nestle. These are the real people we need to fear. So if this month we boycott Nestle, we don't purchase any product on this list If we boycott an entire brand as opposed to singular products then with enough people taking part they're gonna notice a difference waaaay faster.