2025 Target Boycott: Corporate DEI Policy and Activist Consumption

• In Event: Consumers and Consumption Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

The 2025 boycott of Target offers a strategic case for examining how contemporary activist consumption takes shape around corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Drawing on news coverage, publicly available indicators of Target’s market performance, and TikTok videos discussing the boycott, this study analyzes how consumers make sense of their own positions as they interpret the emergence of the boycott following Target’s decision to scale back several post-2020 DEI initiatives. The Target boycott is analytically useful because, despite criticisms that corporate DEI policies can function as public relations–enhancing half-measures that leave structural inequalities intact, they sit at a meso-level between structural inequality and individualized consumer choice, with Target’s former DEI initiatives being particularly substantial. Our study examines how the boycott reveals both the limits and possibilities of consumer boycotts in an individualized society. Across the TikTok videos in our sample, consumers articulate personal shopping ethics, seek validation in comment interactions, and express uncertainty about the boycott’s broader impact. We interpret this uncertainty through the lens of individualization, defined as a social atmosphere where collective security declines and individuals must self-optimize through market participation. Our preliminary findings suggest that Target boycotters prioritize punitive action against the company over sustained relationship-building or coordinated efforts toward broader gender, racial, and economic justice, yet the discourse reveals a latent openness to becoming more organized.

Authors

• Tyler Caleb Wilson Cohen, University of California-Riverside

• Sara Bruene, University of California-Riverside

• Ashley Vargas Torres, UC Riverside

• Shayna La Scala, University of California-Riverside