Are brands boycotted on the web really damaged?

The web is that place where brands boycotted by the "people of the web" are immediately considered bankrupt. If a company commits a serious gaffe or finds itself at the center of a heat wave , boycott actions against the brand and its products begin immediately. How harmful these boycotts are is something worth thinking about. There was talk of a boycott after the gaffe of G uido Barilla , who last year during a radio program declared that his company would never use other families for its commercials other than the traditional one : a simple declaration that unleashed an unimaginable avalanche of criticism from all over the world contesting this stance. Everyone said they didn't want to deal with Barilla anymore and there was talk of a boycott of the brand. And there was also talk of a boycott after the scandal reported by the program Report, regarding the Moncler brand which apparently had geese plucked alive to obtain feathers for its garments. And then there were other cases: Patrizia Pepe and the campaign with the anorexic model, Nestlé which prohibited users from using its logo as a personal profile picture and finally, the recent case of Nivea against Neve , a small Piedmontese cosmetics company not tested on animals.

Pepe's campaign which attracted a lot of criticism due to the model being Paraguay Phone Number judged to be too thin. From Barilla to Nivea, all these cases have only one thing in common: they experienced days of intense crisis which turned into a wave of negative feedback on the web. But are these cases of boycotts a real danger for the brand? If yes, to what extent? What are web boycotts made of? And finally: can they really change the fortunes of a company? Difference between boycott and protest A boycott is a coordinated individual or collective action aimed at isolating a person, organization or company because its behavior is not considered suitable or correct, all with the aim of changing its conduct. A protest, on the other hand, is a more or less controlled demonstration towards people, bodies or organizations with the aim of communicating dissent or a different opinion. The boycott is a deeper action than the protest because it involves precise actions aimed at isolating the company in a concrete way. The protest can be stemmed, the boycott is more difficult to counter.



Talking about a boycott every time a company is the protagonist of a scandal is not always right, because first of all we cannot measure the concrete action of people towards the company itself (how many actually stop buying a company's products after a scandal?) and furthermore, in most cases, the negative feedback that arrives on the web is not always indicative of the general sentiment of the target audience but can only be attributed to a restricted circle of consumers who often do not even fall within the target of the company involved. Let's take the Nivea case : the cosmetics company owned by Beiersdorf attacked a small company from Moncalieri, very popular among young environmentalists , believing that the Neve brand was too similar to Nivea and that it was therefore illegal to use it for cosmetic products. . After agreeing with Nivea, the judge ordered Neve to withdraw all branded products because they were deemed harmful to the "competing" brand. A case that sparked controversy and poured an immense amount of negative and pro-Neve comments onto Nivea's social channels. A boycott was immediately called out , articles and entire pages of newspapers were written, bloggers analyzed the social management of this mess and experts analyzed the damage to Nivea's image, the brand's official pages were stormed and petitions have been launched, signatures have been collected and articles have been written about it.