The Business Ethics Blog

If the NRA were a publicly-traded corporation, I’d be short selling its stock. Not because the organization is going away any time soon, or because I think Americans are going to repeal the Second Amendment any time soon. But because a group of high school students seem to be doing substantial damage to its already divisive brand.

And I’m willing to predict that its brand is going to suffer serious and meaningful damage over the coming weeks and months.

The primary reason is, of all things, a commercial boycott, spearheaded by the student survivors of the recent Florida school massacre, and their supporters. It’s one of the few boycotts I’ve seen that I think actually makes sense, tactically and ethically.

It’s an unusual boycott, in many ways. It’s not aimed at the NRA’s core business—for a membership-based organization like the NRA, that would mean reducing membership. Yes, the boycott is officially called (and hashtagged) #BoycottNRA, but those involved aren’t boycotting the NRA itself, burning their membership cards and so on. They’re boycotting companies that do business with the NRA, and in most cases this means companies that provide benefits to NRA members in the form of things like discounts on purchases or cash-back NRA-branded credit cards. And a stunning string of companies—from Avis to Delta Airlines to MetLife to Symantec—have already caved to the pressure.

(Note: There’s a Wikipedia page about the boycott, with a running tally of companies that have succumbed to the pressure. See: 2018 NRA Boycott.)

Boycotts are mostly stupid, and often immoral. They seldom have much impact, and are often more likely to hurt low-level employees than CEOs or shareholders. Front-line employees, after all, are the ones who get yelled at by angry boycotters, and are most likely to be lose their jobs if the targeted organization ends up needing to tighten its belt. Their role, in most cases, is to let people vent, to engage in virtue signalling, and to give them a focus for their indignation.

But this one, I think, is different. For one thing, the boycott is so diffuse—targeted as it is at dozens of companies—that little real impact can be expected to be felt by those companies, in terms of the bottom line. (Sure, a bunch of people will give up using FedEx—one of the few major companies to hold its ground against the boycott— but are they really going to boycott two dozen companies, and suffer that much disruption of your consumption habits? I bet few will.) This means that no innocent bystanders are likely to be harmed. The pressure is primarily symbolic, and so are the concessions.

The NRA itself is characteristically full of bravado. “Let it be absolutely clear,” the organization said recently in response to the boycott. “The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member from our mission to stand and defend the individual freedoms that have always made America the greatest nation in the world.”

Well, no kidding. But surely that’s not the point. Hurting the NRA by driving a wedge between them and a couple dozen national brands is intended to send a signal to politicians who are cozy with the NRA. Affiliation with the NRA is no longer a clear plus, if it ever was. As the NRA’s brand weakens, so are those relationships likely to become less cozy.

And that’s a good thing.

In just about any other industrialized nation, the NRA would be a quaint fringe group. And its antiquated understanding of what a citizenry needs in order to safeguard itself against tyranny would be laughable, if it weren’t so dangerous. It’s long been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. We’re about to find out whether the boycott is mightier than the gun.

It has to be admitted that the Ram Trucks ad featuring a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr, and played during this year’s Super Bowl, was in fact reasonably subtle. The company’s logo only appeared at the very end, and without much fanfare. In a world of yippee-ki-yay truck ads, featuring manly men doing implausibly manly things in their oversized, manly trucks, an ad focused on promoting service to others set to the inspiring words of true hero is kind of refreshing. Or could have been. Except this is 2018, so what on earth was Fiat Chrysler—makers of Ram trucks—thinking?

A lot of people are referring to the add, and its use of King’s voice to sell trucks, as “tone deaf.” Some on Twitter were merely “disappointed.” Some referred to it as being in “really poor taste” and “insulting” and even “exploitative.” Others referred to it as an act of appropriation. A number mentioned the irony of celebrating a black civil rights activist during the Super Bowl, given that a black football player—Colin Kaepernick—has effectively been blackballed for his activism.

Now, apparently Fiat Chrysler had the consent of King’s family. That’s clearly important, legally and morally. But members of the family aren’t the only relevant stakeholder here. When an individual, or his memory, is a national treasure, there’s a lot more to consider. Clearly, judging by the blowback, an awful lot of people (of all races) feel that they have a stake here, and felt that the commercial was problematic.

It’s useful when examining things from an ethical point of view to start out charitably. So let’s grant that it’s entirely possible that someone at Fiat Chrysler just really, really admired Dr King, and wanted to be able to use 30 incredibly expensive seconds of Super Bowl airtime to play his words. They are, after all, very good words. More people should hear them. Having over a hundred million people hear them all at once is, in principle, a very good thing. But…2018.

The controversy over the commercial is reminiscent of the controversy over businesses attempting to honour veterans, for example by marking what is called Veterans Day in the US, and Remembrance Day in Canada. (On that topic, ssee my older piece, The Ethics of Businesses Honouring Remembrance Day. See also: How Should Companies Memorialize 9/11?) Honouring veterans is generally a good thing. Capitalizing on the respect we all pay them, however, is a bad thing. The difference here, though, is that the world sort of forces the veterans question upon businesses by designating a special day for honouring veterans. It happens on November 11 (in North America) and on that day, every year, companies are bluntly faced with the choice: either mark the occasion (and risk being accused of capitalizing on the sacrifices made by veterans) or ignore it (and risk being accused of, well, ignoring it). But with regard to a figure like King, advertisers have the option of just staying clear. And it’s easy to see the case—both the business case and the moral case—for diving in: linking your brand to the words of a hero is (if it works!) a marketing coup. And if you’re going to celebrate heroes, then it seems like an especially a good thing to celebrate one who fought for such an important cause.

But then, celebration bleeds so readily into commercialization. And maybe it’s literally impossible for a company to do one without the other. Maybe it would be possible, in a fairer world, a world in which so many people didn’t have so much reason to guard King’s image and words so jealously.

Maybe the folks at Fiat Chrysler needed a bigger focus group, or one that was simply more woke.