Yahoo Finance TOMS founder: It's worth losing 'apathetic' customers to take social stances
In December, TOMS shoes, famous for its “one for one” model of charitable giving, kicked off an “End Gun Violence Together” campaign with a $5 million donation to organizations campaigning against gun violence.
Since then, TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie says he’s seen “not a lot of interest from the business community or other CEOs to take similar stances.”
But Mycoskie is optimistic that change will come soon to Corporate America and its traditional reluctance to take political stands.
“I think it is a timing thing,” he said on Yahoo Finance’s YFi AM show. “When you really get down to the math of it, having a group of customers that are passionately engaged in your brand, and growing that, to lose some of the ones that were just apathetic in the first place, is always going to make more sense from a financial perspective. But I think it’s going to take time, there will have to be case studies written in books, and they’re going to have to teach about it.”
Increasingly in America, brands are being pulled into politics whether they like it or not, and consumers are no longer allowing companies to stay silent on social issues. Nike knew it would alienate some customers with its Colin Kaepernick ad campaign, but judged it worth the risk; Mycoskie thinks more businesses will eventually follow that logic.
Mycoskie compares the situation to how the TOMS “one for one” model (for every pair of shoes it sells, TOMS donates a pair to a child in need) caught on: slowly. “For the first five years it was really good for our business, but no one else was doing it,” he says. “Then all of a sudden everyone started doing it.”
While other businesses have not yet jumped on board the TOMS campaign, Mycoskie says the effort has been good for his business. TOMS, in the past few months, has seen a flood of new customers on its website, mostly men. Mycoskie believes these new customers are visiting the TOMS site “largely because they’re interested in how they can participate in our initiative, and then they see products they had no idea we did. It’s bringing a ton of attention to the brand.”
TOMS held an event at its offices in Santa Monica, Calif. on Jan. 16 to publicize the campaign. Speakers included Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti.
For its next move in the End Gun Violence Together campaign, TOMS will lead a rally in Washington on Feb. 5 to deliver handwritten postcards to members of Congress and urge them to pass legislation for universal background checks for gun purchases.
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Daniel Roberts is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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