Protests against President Donald Trump’s administration, once muted, are gathering momentum, as evidenced by a surge of activity, including planned demonstrations against layoffs at 63 National Parks across 29 states, nationwide protests against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency federal budget cuts and increasingly tense exchanges at town halls held by Republican senators in their home states.
When people take to the streets to protest, firms pay attention—even when the protests are not directly targeted at themselves or rival firms. This played out when the #MeToo movement led to corporate policy changes, including stricter harassment policies and increased accountability measures. Likewise, the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations caused firms to reevaluate and revamp their diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, with many launching new initiatives to address systemic racial inequities.
Could angry town halls and citizen protests prompt firms to reassess their response to contentious policies of the new administration?
Protests As Information
Protests can inform corporate actions when they provide business leaders with additional data points and better understanding about their constituents’ sentiment on societal issues.
Community protests can sharpen business leaders’ awareness of constituents’ concerns, especially when the implications for business are clear, for example when related to labor or consumer issues. This is the conclusion from a study that examines how corporate policies changed in response to Women’s March protests in the U.S. between 2017 and 2020. Firms with headquarters in places where larger marches took place were more likely to appoint female directors afterwards, according to Penn State University and Dartmouth College researchers.
Protests may also cause business leaders to engage more with the contested issue. That’s because demonstrations may cause people to search for information about the issue in question, often expanding support for the cause and shifting public discourse towards protestors. This is the conclusion reached in a Carnegie Mellon University study that examined funding patterns in DonorsChoice, the largest crowdfunding website for public school teachers. BLM protests could be linked to an increase in the monetary support people gave teachers for purchasing anti-racism books, the study finds.
What Protests Are Most Influential?
Business leaders seem especially influenced by protests that occur in their business’ local community, particularly those happening near corporate headquarters. Executives are also more likely to respond to protests that reveal something unexpected about their community, according to the Penn State and Dartmouth study.
When protests happen in unexpected places—for example, gatherings to object to DOGE’s federal budget cuts and layoffs in counties that heavily favored Trump in the 2024 election, like Parkersburg, West Virginia, or town halls where Republican senators are challenged in Trump-leaning states like North Carolina and Wyoming—they are more likely to prompt a corporate response.
Notably, companies least aligned with the protest’s goals are most likely to make changes, suggesting that executives in those places see protests as a manifestation of shifting values in their environment that their business needs to adjust to.
Monitoring Protests Benefits Firms
CEOs and boards can benefit from monitoring protests, even if they are not directly targeted. Examining the firm’s alignment with local community and stakeholders’ values can help identify synergies with their business strategy. This was the case at Nike: executives leveraged synergies between the company’s purpose and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kapernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, sparking broader protest in the NFL.
Changing values reflected in the protests may call for executives to adapt their offerings. In response to public outcry over gun violence, Dick’s Sporting Goods ceased selling assault-style rifles and raised the minimum age for gun purchases. Similarly, Walmart discontinued sales of certain types of ammunition and requested that customers refrain from openly carrying firearms in their stores.
Attentiveness to protests can also help executives and their boards to anticipate regulatory changes that may affect their business. Shifting values in a firm’s headquarters community could foreshadow policy and regulatory changes, which may affect firm governance, policy, and operations: politicians, too, are motivated to address the issues that their voters care about, and regulatory changes can affect local businesses.
Protest Assessment For Business Leaders
To evaluate the potential impact of local protests on your regulatory environment and business practices, consider the following questions as a starting point.
How many people are protesting? To what extent do protestors’ profiles match those of our employees and customers? Consider checking with official estimates and reports from independent sources like Carnegie-Mellon’s Global Protest Tracker.
What is the protesters’ stance on the issue ? How does it relate to our corporate purpose and values? What data could we use to triangulate data our assessment of changing values in the local community? Social listening tools, sentiment analysis and survey data can help assess shifting attitudes in the local community. Local media coverage and political statements may also provide insights on the extent of societal value change.
How might our regulatory environment change as a result of shifting values in our headquarters’ community? How likely are these changes and in what time frame? Monitoring bills or regulatory changes introduced in response to similar protests elsewhere, can help estimate how much political support the protestors are likely to garner. Another approach is to gauge pressure from investors, customers, and advocacy groups for policy shifts.
What changes (if any) do we need to make to our product and service offerings? To our internal practices and policies? To our communication strategy? Assess whether expectations or concerns raised by the protests require updates to the firm’s offerings or to human resources policies.
Given the scope of changes brought about by the new administration, it’s important for organizations planning for the long term to gain clarity on where their employees and customers stand. Local protests could be an important source of information for business leaders about how these values are shifting.