Hi {{ first_name | default: there }},

Every other week right now, someone is calling for a boycott of something. A brand says the wrong thing, a CEO shakes the wrong hand, a campaign lands in the wrong moment — and within hours there's a hashtag, a thread going viral, and a room full of brand people staring at each other wondering how bad this actually is.

Scott Galloway just called for a full month of cancelling Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, Meta and half the internet. Good luck with that one.

The data keeps showing the same thing, and most crisis meetings never get to it: the boycott is rarely what kills the brand. It's the response. One brand watched 75% of social media call for a boycott and posted a 22% sales increase. Another did everything the playbook said and lost a market position it had held for twenty years.

We went very deep on the reasons why. I mean very deep!

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

There is a specific kind of paralysis that descends on brand teams when the internet turns on them. Someone walks in with a screenshot. Legal is on the call, muted. Someone from comms has already drafted three statements. The CMO is asking whether this is a "wait it out" or "get ahead of it" situation, as if those are the only two options.

What nobody says out loud, but everybody is thinking: just make it go away. Sand down whatever edge caused this. Go quiet until the algorithm finds something else to be angry about.

This is the instinct that has quietly destroyed more brand equity than any boycott ever has.

The brands that capitulate to it — that spend their crisis meetings hunting for the safest possible middle ground — don’t emerge from controversies stronger. They emerge smaller. A brand-shaped object that could belong to anyone and therefore belongs to no one. Cautious enough to avoid a bad headline. Not interesting enough to make anyone care.

The brands that survive, and the ones that actually benefit from controversy, did something different before the meeting ever happened. They knew who they were for. They’d made the customer segment trade-off explicitly, not by accident. They’d built a position so clear that most boycotts were, structurally, irrelevant — because the people with the loudest grievances were never their customers anyway.

The data on this is not ambiguous. And it should change how you run that meeting.

July 2020. Robert Unanue, CEO of Goya Foods, stood in the White House Rose Garden and praised Donald Trump. Within hours the hashtag was everywhere. Boycott posts accounted for 75% of all social media chatter about the brand. Over 1,500 media stories ran with “Goya” in the headline. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted her homemade arepas recipe as a pointed alternative. The brand appeared finished.

Actual sales impact: a 22% increase.

Cornell researcher Jūra Liaukonytė tracked the household purchase data and found the boycott was real — purchases dropped modestly in Democratic-leaning counties for about eight weeks. But the buycott was larger, faster, and came from a pool with no ceiling.

The math is brutal. Only 7% of American households already bought Goya products. That’s your maximum boycott pool — people who actually have something to stop buying. The buycott pool? Unlimited. Any shopper in any grocery store could grab a can of beans they’d never bought before. And they did. Republican-leaning counties saw massive first-time purchases from people who had never thought about Goya in their lives.

Three weeks later, the whole thing evaporated. Buycotters went back to their regular brands. Most boycotters did too. Core Latino customers — Goya’s actual base — barely changed their behavior at all. They’d been buying Goya for decades and a Rose Garden appearance wasn’t going to rearrange their pantry.

Seventy-five percent boycott sentiment online. Twenty-two percent sales increase in reality. If you’re making brand decisions based on social media volume, you’re not reading the market — you’re reading a very loud, very unrepresentative sample of it.

👉 Read the full analysis

Two women sharing a Tony's bar on a sofa. Normal evening. Then a wrestler called X-Ploitation — big hair, 90s pay-per-view villain energy — crashes through the living room wall and starts brawling with a wrestler named Tony. X-Ploitation is child labour. X-Ploitation is farmers paid less than subsistence wages. X-Ploitation is deforestation burning through Côte d'Ivoire. Thirty seconds. House of Oddities. Tony's first-ever TV campaign.

Tony's didn't buy their way onto television — they won £500k of Sky airtime through the Zero Footprint Fund, a sustainability initiative that puts purpose-driven brands in front of national audiences. Most brands would have made something responsible with it. Tony's made something you'd actually watch twice.

The bit worth stealing isn't the media win. It's the inversion. Most chocolate brands making a values-led ad would have made an ad about cocoa farmers — sincere voiceover, sunlit fields, the whole genre. Tony's made an ad about a wrestler bodyslamming someone through furniture. The farmers are implied. The wrestling is what you watch. Trust the audience to make the connection themselves, and they're slightly more invested than they were thirty seconds ago.

Why it matters: 1.56 million children are involved in cocoa farming in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Twenty years of fighting exploitation in the supply chain. It took a villain in spandex to finally make it entertaining — and a client brave enough to back a batshit crazy idea when they finally had the airtime to prove it.

👉 Read the full breakdown

The first floor of LCDC Seoul used to fix cars. It's now Ephemera — a café in Seongsu-dong where expired transit tickets sit behind glass and postage stamps are arranged like artworks. Objects designed to be thrown away, kept by accident, becoming precious over time. Studio OKGO rebranded it. The result hit Best of Behance with over 1,600 appreciations.

Seoul has more cafés per capita than any city on earth. The ones that die look fine — clean type, warm photography, considered palettes that dissolve into every other specialty coffee brand within five kilometers. Most studios would have clocked the mood and responded to it. Warm illustration, period typography with good credentials, something that gestures at collectibility. A perfectly competent café identity that nobody remembers.

Studio OKGO solved a different problem. The illustration work has the formal, decorative quality of vintage transit printing — slightly ceremonial, with the rounded characters and careful ornamentation of mid-century stamp design. Not retro in the winking way studios deploy retro. Something that couldn't have looked any other way because the concept demanded this specific register. The visual system doesn't illustrate the concept of collected objects — it looks like it was itself collected. One is decoration. The other is identity.

Why it matters: Every project has two versions of the brief. The surface one — make it look good, feel right, photograph well — and the one underneath, about what the brand actually means. Most studios find the surface brief and deliver competently against it. A café built around throwaway things that become precious needed design that felt both discarded and cherished. That distinction is why this landed on Behance Best Of instead of disappearing into the noise.

👉 Read the full analysis