How much do boycotts affect a company’s bottom line?

But will it get the results you want?

After all, for every punch thrown online, someone is ready with a counter punch. Another camp, supporting the policy or a politician, may urge their followers to go shopping. This counter move is called a buycott.

Anna Tuchman, a marketing professor at Kellogg, wanted to know what really happens to consumer behavior—and sales—when a company finds itself in a political firestorm on social media. “While there were a lot of boycotts in the past, there are more buycotts now,” he says.

Business leaders want to understand how social media outrage is affecting their bottom line, Tuchman says. Previous research focused primarily on boycotts, but Tuchman was interested in the more comprehensive view of the impact of simultaneous boycotts and takeovers.

When Tuchman and her colleagues, Jura Liaukonytė of Cornell University and Xinrong Zhu of Imperial College, drawing deeply on one company’s experience, found that the buycott effect overwhelmed boycott action and sales actually increased. But the impact evaporated in just a few weeks.

It’s a counterproductive effect, Tuchman says. Calls for boycotts often outnumber those voices offering support for the company on social media or in news articles. “In the absence of sales data, you’d think it’s probably devastating to the brand.”

How much impact do boycotts really have?

In July 2020, Robert Unanue, the CEO of Latin food supply company Goya—who has previously struck a nerve with his inflammatory comments on immigration—praised then-President Trump during a meeting at the White House. The comments sparked immediate backlash and many Latino leaders called for a boycott. The hashtags #Goyaway and #BoycottGoya were trending on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters have launched a #BuyGoya and #BuycottGoya counter-movement.

At the time, the social impact of #BoycottGoya vs. #BuycottGoya was as clear as black soup. Media reports predicted disaster for the company: the media published over 1,500 stories with Goya in the title, and only 18 mentioned the buycott. and calls for boycotts far outnumbered buycott calls on Twitter. However, Unanue claimed that sales increased by 1,000 percent.

To find out the true impact on sales, Tuchman and his colleagues obtained detailed purchase data from market research firm Numerator on 33,486 households that bought a Goya product at least once between January 2019 and December 2020. The information included dates of shopping trips and quantity, prices, brand and parent brand of each product purchased. The data also included demographic information such as household size, income, age, race/ethnicity, and zip code. Researchers were able to match households with county-level voting statistics from the 2020 presidential election.

In the two weeks immediately following the CEO’s remarks, 16.9 percent of buyers who purchased Goya products were first-time Goya buyers—a testament to the buycott’s impact. The buycott movement disproportionately brought first-time Goya buyers from Republican areas—sales rose 56.4 percent in heavily Republican counties.

Meanwhile, “we find that the brand’s most valuable customers, Latinos, have not reduced their purchases of Goya products, despite vocal support for the boycott movement from prominent Latinos,” the paper notes.

Overall, the buycott effect outweighed the effect of the boycott, increasing Goya sales by 22% over the two-week period. But the impact was temporary. there was no detectable increase in sales after three weeks. (In their analyses, the researchers controlled for the effects of seasonal fluctuations, price changes, holiday effects and long-term sales growth due to the pandemic.)

Why didn’t the boycott have more of an impact?

Of course, the Goya boycott and buycott took place in the larger context of US political polarization. The survey shows that there is a political divide among American consumers in their brand preferences — a divide that only widened after the election of Donald Trump.

Tuchman and her colleagues calculated that, before the scandal, of the top 300 consumer packaged goods brands, Goya was the most Democratic, based on its high concentration of customers in left-leaning counties.

This makes her a somewhat unusual case. “Most of the time, when brands take political positions, they’re trying to give their core customer base what they want to hear,” says Tuchman. “In this case, the message advertised by the CEO was actually at odds with the preferences of many of the key customers.”

So what accounts for the loyalty of Goya’s customers during the boycott? Tuchman points out that brand loyalty can be strong—especially for products that don’t have an equivalent substitute, like Goya’s Adobo seasoning.

And, in an important way, the failure of the boycott in the face of a buycott was entirely predictable, Tuchman points out. Only seven percent of American households already regularly bought Goya products and could effectively participate in a boycott. Instead, any buyer can participate in a buycott.

As far as shoppers are concerned, the stakes of switching grocery brands are pretty low: you can always come back. Trading in higher ticket items, where consumers are likely to be more risk averse, may be less efficient.

Finally, grocery store brands are not particularly prominent signifiers of political identity. “No one knows what brand of beans your family buys,” says Tuchman. Products that are more visible, such as clothing or cars with a brand logo, may have a greater or longer-term impact than boycotts or buyouts.

What can company leaders learn from Goya’s experience?

Tuchman is quick to say that Goya’s case may be unique, mainly because Goya is a private, family-owned company, so its CEO can say whatever he wants without any backlash from shareholders or the board.

However, the extreme political difference between Goya’s CEO and its key customers provides strong empirical evidence that a boycott does not equate to a bad business outcome if a buycott is also in place, Tuchman says.

She and her colleagues are currently researching how other companies fare during boycotts. For example, Tuchman recently published data showing that the boycott of audio streaming service Spotify did not stop growth in its subscriber base.

There is one potentially confounding factor that Tuchman and other researchers say needs to be addressed. When a brand is in the news or trending on social media, the wave of publicity can act like an advertisement to boost sales, meaning people may be more likely to buy a product not because they are actively participating in the buycott, but because I heard the brand very recently.

While business leaders shouldn’t assume their experience of a boycott will be the same as Goya’s, they can take comfort from these results, Tuchman says.

“I would feel a sense of relative peace knowing that the building evidence suggests that, even when there is a major scandal, the effects don’t seem to last long,” he says.