Tag Archives: marketing

Guest Post: A Market Research Approach to Encouraging Citizen Participation in Anticorruption

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Today’s guest post is from Torplus Yomnak, Jake Pattaratanakul, Apichart Kanarattanavong, Thanee Chaiwat, and Charoen Sutuktis of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

A team at Chulalongkorn University recently undertook a research project to examine the factors that increase public participation in anticorruption efforts, so as to develop a more effective communication strategy to promote public participation. (The final paper is currently only available in Thai, though an English translation is in progress, and a summary of the work can be found here.) The study employed a concept used in marketing research called “segmentation,” which seeks to identify latent classes of people—sorted by various characteristics and indicators—who will be more responsive to particular kinds of messaging. In marketing research, the idea is to identify which potential consumers will be most responsive to certain marketing strategies. The same research techniques can be used to classify different segments of the public by their likely responsiveness to anticorruption messaging (or to different kinds of anticorruption messaging).

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Targeting Trump Businesses as a Response to Conflicts of Interest

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Many people, myself included, believe Donald Trump’s failure to place his assets in a blind trust is more than just problematic. The full extent to which President Trump may be abusing public power for private gain—that is, engaging in corruption—is unknowable, so long as his business empire remains opaque and his tax returns stay buried. Even where Trump’s business interests are out in the open, a “shadow of corruption” hangs over the actions he takes as an ostensible public servant.

Some of the people who share these concerns are exploring ways in which they might engage in consumer activism as a response to Trump’s conflicts of interest. Consider two organizations that are leading broad boycotts against the Trump Administration. Don’t Pay Trump is a web browser extension that allows one to, in their words, “keep your money out of Trump’s tiny hands.” It alerts the consumer when he or she is making an online purchase from a business that sells Trump products. A second initiative, #grabyourwallet, is a more established and exceedingly low-tech enterprise which also calls for “flexing consumer power.” #grabyourwallet maintains what looks like an excel spreadsheet that displays companies ripe for a Trump boycott. It provides the necessary tools to the activist consumer: name and number of the company, reason it should be boycotted, suggested sample of what to say, and updates on successes. #grabyourwallet received credit for the recent Nordstroms decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s produces from its stores, which earned Nordstroms a Presidential tweeted complaint on February 8th.

Both of these organizations attempt to decrease the profitability of Trump businesses, albeit for different reasons. Don’t Pay Trump seeks to weaponize consumer power to affect administration policy, while #grabyourwallet is explicitly motivated by the Trump family’s conflicts. It is difficult to say how effective the anti-Trump boycotts might be, given the absence of direct analogies to the current situation. Nonetheless, we might be able to draw some lessons from past corporate boycott efforts:

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