Students as socially responsible consumers

QUESTION: We liked your MRx column of last Friday about that poor senior high school student whose mother wanted him to get an immediate job so he could help her.

We’re also Class D and Class E students struggling to finish our college degree in business management. We are also concerned about socially responsible companies.

But our concern is not just about being able to work for such companies, but as current buyers and consumers of their products.

We’ve googled some of the leading consumer companies about their CSR (corporate social responsibility) projects, as well as how socially and ethically friendly their products are. We were unbelievingly shocked to find out about the latter aspect.

Three of our most admired companies have been severely criticized for socially irresponsible and unethical production and marketing of their brands.

Google and the websites we visited all talked about consumer groups who called for boycotts against these companies. Should we organize ourselves and declare a boycott against a company here that we find unethical? What should we do as consumers?

Answer: As I understand it, you’re all graduating college students in business management. So you must be familiar with management cases that your professors use in teaching how to solve management problems and make management decisions. Why don’t you treat your questions as a management case to analyze and solve.

In analyzing and solving a management case, you know that you have to start with the case facts about both sides of the issue: that of the accused and the accuser. This way you do not pre-judge as already guilty those companies against whom a boycott has been called.

Let’s consider a case that’s relevant to your group. This is the case of “Fruit of the Loom,” an undergarment company against whom the “United Students Against Sweatshops” called a boycott in 2006.

The protest was about the company’s mistreatment and forced dismissal of workers, factory closure and trade union harassment in Honduras. What the student activists did was to persuade 96 US colleges and 10 British universities “to sever their contracts with the company.”

Over the period of the boycott, Fruit of the Loom lost $50 million but came to their senses and decided to settle the case. They reopened the factory and rehired the fired workers.

Wharton School’s Professor Maurice Schweitzer observed that while the Fruit of the Loom case may be considered a “successful” boycott, this is more an exception than the rule.

According to Schweitzer, “boycotts are shockingly common.” There’s lots of them, but “not much success.”

This is also the view of Kellogg Management School’s Professor Brayden King who studied 221 boycotts from 1990 to 2005.

So we now come to your questions: “Should we organize ourselves and declare a boycott against a company here that we find unethical? What should we do as consumers?”

Because there are more failed boycotts than successful ones, you should learn more from the failures than the successes.

You’ll learn what not to do from the failures. From successes, you’ll learn the do’s.

If you analyze the stories of failed boycotts and those of successful ones over the past 10 to 15 years, you will find that there are just about seven fail-proof and success-assuring factors to attend to and to maintain:

Designate your boycott’s objective as actionable and reachable results. Keep in mind the SMART criteria for setting objectives: S for specific, M for measurable, A for attainable, R for realistic, and T for time-bound.

Secure the support of a well-funded organization that is familiar with how to make a boycott work and to continue the campaign over an extended period of time. Define your extended period of time in months and not in days.

People the boycotting organization with dedicated activists who have previously worked under the culture of stick-to-it, flawless implementation.

Attend to the immediate, as well as longer term, support of the most affected consumer segment or segments.

The more the boycott issue and your proposed solution are more easily appreciated and understood by consumers, the more will they support the cause.

Win continuing media support. The Brayden King study tells you that, as your boycott issue earns more and more press coverage, the more likely will the threatened company give in to the boycotters’ demand.

The more the boycotted company is made to believe that the boycott continuation will increasingly damage their corporate reputation, the more amenable to settlement will the company become.

What is therefore more influential here is that perceived risk to corporate reputation than the risk of lost sales.

If you think of yourselves as boycott managers and implementors, you have to prepare and train yourselves for the difficult tasks ahead. Seven of those tasks were given above.

Do well in each of these and you substantially reduce the risk of failure. You’re on your way to becoming young socially responsible consumers.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to me at  [email protected].