No Neutral Ground: Preparing for Activism Everywhere in the Trump Era

By Jeremy Jacobs and Shawn Prince, March 14, 2017

Since the election of President , who avidly uses as a Bully Pulpit, we’ve advised companies that find themselves spotlighted by a Trump tweet to take the dialogue offline as quickly as possible and not to escalate (The Bully Tweet).

It’s still good advice, as even positive attention from the President can have unexpected consequences – a “thank you” tweet from Trump to L.L. Bean, for example, prompted some customers to boycott the brand. As the new President has moved from rhetoric to executive orders, however, many companies are finding that it’s either impossible or undesirable to avoid publicly engaging the administration’s actions.

In particular, some companies have decided to take a public stand on Trump’s executive orders regarding immigration. Even CEO Lloyd Blankfein, someone who “doesn’t wake up in the morning looking for things to opine on,” delivered to employees what the Journal called, “a denunciation of President Donald Trump’s immigration ban.”

Other companies have been unexpectedly pulled into the fray. Uber provides the best example: despite taking no immediate stance on the issue, the car service giant was perceived by some customers as trying to break a taxi strike being conducted in protest at New York’s JFK airport. Although the company has since said it wasn’t in support of Trump’s executive order, that didn’t stop the hashtag #deleteuber from quickly trending on Twitter, and eventually public pressure forced Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign from President Trump's business advisory council.

We have in effect entered a new age of corporate activism, where activists targeting public companies could be in the White House, or they could be customers or employees, empowered by social media. Compounding this dynamic is the fact that the American public – paying consumers of companies’ products and services – remains acutely polarized. Polls show that just as many people support the President’s policies as those who oppose them.

In such a combustible environment, even non-involvement can be interpreted as picking a side, which means corporate directors and executives may not be able to avoid the spotlight, or expect it to pass over them quickly. Based on our experience helping boards and companies navigate through complex and multi-faceted situations, we offer some advice for them to follow in this new age of “activism everywhere.”

KYA – Know Your Audience To stay ahead of such outcomes, businesses must identify their vulnerabilities to Trump-era activism: the tweets, comments and executive orders that would impact them and their relationships with key constituents. This starts with evaluating the make-up of the company’s own customer and employee bases. Who are these people, what issues may activate them, and how do they communicate? Uber again provides an instructive example: its users and employees have specific characteristics that made them more likely to object to the immigration ban, and do so in the way they did. Uber users are highly likely to be younger and more urban, and therefore more likely to disagree with the President’s policies, and to be active on social media. Most importantly, their relationship with the company is solely through a smartphone app, and can easily be severed with the press of a button. Similarly, Uber drivers, some of whom are immigrants themselves, are part-time employees who can easily jump ship to competing companies with relatively little consequence.

By contrast, some companies are taking calculated risks to align with activists whom they see as their core constituents. Airbnb – also a well-known brand with a track record of conflict with historically liberal cities – promised to give free housing to refugees and started a #weaccept campaign. This is the same company that just six months ago was the subject of a New York Times article called, “Does Airbnb enable racism?” Clearly, Airbnb saw an opportunity to realign how it is perceived by its mobile, diverse and tech-savvy clientele, even at the risk of alienating those who support limiting immigration.

Plan for the Unlikely One of our key tools for helping companies anticipate and plan for attacks by shareholder activists has been conducting scenario planning and tabletop simulations. In the new Trump-era of activism everywhere, companies should be extending this kind of advance preparation to a wider array of challenges, including some that might seem remote or normal course. Every scenario needs to be considered – even something that might be routine under ordinary circumstances can become an overnight crisis. For example, for the head of IBM to play a role in advising the U.S. President would ordinarily arouse no comment, but in the current landscape CEO Ginni Rometty felt compelled to explain to her employees why she was advising the President (through a note that worked its way into ). In each possible case, the goal should be to identify the issues to which customers or employees might react negatively, and the measures they might take to communicate their discontent.

To develop, play out and maintain these scenarios will require some research, the assembly of a team of outside advisors with relevant insights (into areas such as corporate reputation, investor relations, consumer branding, social media and D.C. politics) and active traditional and social media monitoring to flag potentially relevant issues and public sentiment about them. And the tabletop exercises themselves should be nuanced and multi-faceted just as their real-life counterparts are.

Such planning should also include consideration not just of how constituencies might react but also what channels companies should use to reach them. Social media has proven a tremendously powerful tool, but it can also magnify missteps – and not every important audience is equally attentive to social media.

Since there truly is no neutral ground these days, every company needs to be prepared for action, even if it intends to stay silent, even if it believes it would never be targeted or involved in a Trump- related public controversy. Not to be prepared would be, in the words of a certain someone in D.C., sad.

We have been helping companies manage unexpected communications challenges for over 30 years. We invite you to visit our website to learn more about our team, services and insights.

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