Voting with your money just leveled up.
Today, we launch MoneyVoice, the ultimate tool for voting with your money. Why should you care, when a thousand other tech products are also launching today? Most of today’s thousand shiny product launches ultimately will not matter. Your precious attention should be reserved for the truly interesting ones with the potential to be enormously impactful.
When I look at the most impactful companies, I see that they have two things in common:
- They address a problem that the majority of the world’s population has been experiencing for at least a century.
- People are not aware that they have the problem until they discover the new solution, at which point the problem becomes instantly intolerable.
Facebook solved the problem of not being able to keep in touch with your friends. Google solved the problem of it being too difficult to learn new information. Amazon solved the problem of it not being fast and easy to buy something. Now that these solutions exist, there is no going back.
I like the way that entrepreneur Joshua Schachter sums up this enigma of the startup world: “You have to solve a problem that people actually have. But it’s not always a problem that they know they have, so that’s tricky.”
I’m very excited about the product we have built, and I encourage you to go give it a try! But rather than describe the product details, this post will focus on the problem we address:
- Why the majority of the world’s population has been experiencing this problem for centuries.
- Why I believe that using MoneyVoice will make people instantly aware that they have been suffering an intolerable problem for their whole lives.
Here is the problem we solve: When most people buy products and services, they have feelings about the business. They have desires to a) express those feelings and b) have an impact on the business, by “voting with their money.” But the current experience of doing so leaves both desires unsatisfied.
Before I brashly attempt to redefine the widely-used term “vote with your money,” let us discuss the historical meaning of that phrase. In the beginning, there was a farmer in the village who grew corn, and two people who made baskets. When the farmer wanted a basket, he would trade some of his corn. If one of the basketmakers acted like a jerk, the farmer would choose to reward the other basketmaker with his business. Quite simply, “voting with your money” has always meant making a purchase decision to express a feeling or have an impact.
Some economists might define it differently. They would say this term is just a pithy way to describe supply and demand. In their view supply and demand is about economically rational people making decisions based on price and product quality. But in reality, most purchase decisions are driven by feelings, not logic. Perhaps the concepts are similar, but my point is that no one can understand commerce without understanding feelings. Feelings have guided our mundane purchase decisions for centuries, and when our feelings have gotten really strong we have gone to great lengths so our purchases would have an impact.
In the decades before the American Revolution, Americans boycotted English goods as a protest against the Stamp Act and the tax on tea.¹ In the Civil War, abolitionists boycotted goods produced by southern slave plantations.² From 1898–1919 supporters of the White Label Campaign bought garments made in factories with fair labor practices.³ The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Since then we have turned our attention to farmworkers, to Japanese cars, to apartheid, to dolphin-safe tuna, to big-box stores, and at every turn we have voted with our money.
There are many examples, and in all cases the key expression of power was the purchase decision. The largest moments of collective upheaval have been powerful, but also relatively infrequent.
However, in the last year, “voting with your money” has absolutely exploded in prevalance, while the purchase decision itself is becoming less central to this sort of activity. Grab Your Wallet has leveraged Twitter to lead boycotts and campaigns against companies doing business with the Trump family. Sleeping Giants has led a movement on Twitter resulting in over 3,700 companies removing their advertisements from Breitbart.com. Nearly every week a new company is being ravaged in social media: Uber, Pepsi, United Airlines, Nordstrom, H&M, and so on. People now want to influence what companies sell, where and how they advertise, who their executives are, how their products work, how they treat an individual customer, how they design a specific garment, and so on. This is new, and it’s driven by social media. Brands are getting pulled into all of these new conversations, and they have to take a stand.
Ultimately, it’s still about sales. Uber’s scandals did hurt sales as people switched to Lyft. But the importance of brand is increasing rapidly. In 1980, 95% of corporate value was in tangible assets. Today, tangible assets only represent 30–40% of value, and brand represents 30–40%. Meanwhile, that brand value went from something controlled by businesses to something controlled by the public. A business no longer gets to decide what their identity will be. We decide. All of this means that our influence in commerce is no longer limited to our purchase decisions. It is increasingly also about our ability to communicate information that defines brands.
After thinking about this for over a decade (and leading a global social movement focused on influencing businesses), I’ve decided that defining our “vote” in commerce as a “purchase decision” is too limited of a definition, given the other ways we can and should express our power. To explain why, let’s return to the meaning of voting, in the electoral sense.
When you vote in an election, you decide what you want, and then you communicate that information. You express a feeling or belief, and hopefully have an impact. Filling out your ballot isn’t the important part. The important part is that information about what you want is communicated.
Imagine if elections were this dysfunctional: There is no concept of citizenship or registering to vote. Anyone can vote as many times as they want. After you vote, no one counts the votes, and you never see any results from all the voting. The best you get is an exit pollster outside who goes on TV and says, “I am seeing a lot of young voters so I think it’s a progressive victory.”
This completely fails to fulfill the purpose of elections. But this is exactly what happens when we vote with our money. Imagine you care about Fair Trade coffee, it’s 7am, and you’re standing between a Dunkin Donuts and a McDonalds. You know that 100% of Dunkin Donuts coffee is Fair Trade, and that’s not true at McDonalds, so you choose Dunkin Donuts. Congrats, you just voted with your money! Literally no one in the world except for you knows that you were trying to communicate something, nor do they know what you wished to communicate. You get no response, no positive feedback, and you know that neither business has any idea that you made this choice, or why you made this choice. They would probably conclude that your decision was based on who had the coolest neon sign, the coolest celebrity endorsement ad on So You Think You Can Dance, or maybe it was because of that “free donut day” a few years ago. You cling to the idea that if enough people make the same choice you did there is some statistician who will figure out that people want more Fair Trade products, and you will be shifting the market. And that may be true. But if voting is about expressing what you want and communicating that information then it’s quite a stretch to call this voting.
I won’t say that this communicates zero information, but I will say that it communicates about 1% of what you would probably like to communicate. You might want Dunkin Donuts to know that you care about Fair Trade because you care about biodiversity. You might want them to know that you also want them to switch to Fair Trade chocolate in their donuts, and that if they did that you would become extremely loyal, come more often, and tell your friends. Too bad there is no useful way to communicate any of that.
This is such a completely terrible and ineffective way to make your voice heard, and yet no one currently thinks that they have a problem voting with their money. We talk about how we do it all the time. We don’t fully grasp how bad we have it, because we’ve never imagined a 10x better way to do it.
What if you could register to vote with your money, and every single time you made any purchase at any business you would earn a vote? What if you could ask a business to do something and have other customers vote for your suggestion? What if you could prove that you were a real, loyal customer? What if you could actually communicate to company executives the reason why you made a purchase, and what if you could do this in seconds, with a single tap on your phone? You could tell Dunkin Donuts that you care about Fair Trade, and other customers could join you. What if you knew that Dunkin Donuts would count the votes? Dunkin Donuts executives don’t read all the Yelp reviews or the tweets. They are too busy studying financial data, trying to figure out what real customers want. I stated that you can’t understand commerce without understanding feelings. Businesses understand financial data, but they don’t understand feelings, so they don’t understand you. What if there were a way to translate your feelings into financial data so that businesses could actually get the message? What if those executives could see proof of how much money there was to be made by making more investments in Fair Trade? What if those executives responded to you right on your phone? This is the future we are building with MoneyVoice, and once you experience this new way of voting I expect that you will find the old way to be intolerably naive, ineffective and unfulfilling.
The old definition of voting with your money was making a purchase decision to express a feeling or have an impact. I propose we broaden the definition to mean using your power as a customer to express a feeling or have an impact. Today, we have a new kind of power: we can finally communicate information along with our purchases. We could already communicate with businesses on social media, but not as verified customers. Businesses will pay more attention to feedback from verified customers on MoneyVoice because they can be certain of the value of the feedback. On Twitter, businesses don’t know if they are talking to real customers or Russian troll bots.
The other thing I like about this new definition is that it’s more inclusive. Of course MoneyVoice is inherently unequal as a voting system because you have to have money to participate, but our approach is actually much more inclusive of people who don’t have very much money. For example, let’s say you care deeply about organic food and you want to promote that by voting with your money. Many people in this situation shop at Whole Foods and buy organic food. But buying organic food is an expensive privilege that is unavailable to someone in poverty. If you can only afford to buy the cheapest unhealthy hot dogs at Walmart, then you are excluded, and have no way to vote with your money. In fact, Walmart is incorrectly drawing the conclusion that you want unhealthy hot dogs. But with MoneyVoice, this changes. With every purchase you can tell them that you want affordable organic hot dogs. For a person who feels powerless, and unable to express their true values, MoneyVoice gives them a voice, a new type of power, and the feeling that their purchases can still reflect their values and have an impact on the world.
Some people (like me!) care about social benefit and using this power to change the world. Other people may only care about getting better customer service, or not having so much dang salt in the clam chowder. But we all have feelings to express. We all want to feel heard, and to have an impact. Now those who want to vote with their money can literally do that. Let’s think bigger than the purchase decision: If every purchase you made had a voice, what would it say? Your money is power. Join us in embracing a new way to actually use that power effectively.
Brent Schulkin is the Founder/CEO of MoneyVoice. Follow him on Twitter.
Notes:
¹ Michele Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 39
² Ibid., 40
³ Ibid., 50
