BoycottsU.S. consumer boycott of French-sounding products during 2003 Iraq War
Remember “freedom fries?” In 2002, as the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was gearing up to invade Iraq, tensions were rising in the U.N. Security Council, where France, deeply opposed to an attack on Iraq, threatened to use its veto power to stop the action. In the United States, sentiment toward Paris plummeted, particularly among conservative Americans. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly announced on the air he was boycotting French products, and Capitol Hill cafeterias famously renamed French fries as “freedom fries,” in an edible admonishment of the French government. Do U.S. consumers boycott products in response to international conflict? Two professors at the University of Virginia say that in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer is “yes.”
Do U.S. consumers boycott products in response to international conflict? Two professors at the University of Virginia say that in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer is “yes.”
Remember “freedom fries?” A brief refresher: As the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was gearing up to wipe out what it called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” tensions were rising in the U.N. Security Council. France was deeply opposed to an attack and threatened to use its veto power to stop the action.
In the United States, sentiment toward Paris plummeted, particularly among conservative Americans. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly announced on the air he was boycotting French products and Capitol Hill cafeterias famously renamed French fries as “freedom fries,” in an edible admonishment of the French government.
A U.Va. release reports that talk of boycotts was in the air, but as noted in a forthcoming paper in the journal Review of Economics and Statistics, measuring their economic impact has been a slippery affair.
“Most studies infer boycott behavior from indirect measures, such as bilateral trade patterns, abnormal stock market returns or consumer surveys, which are typically inconsistent with actual behavior,” write associate professor of politics Sonal Pandya and business professor Rajkumar Venkatesan in their study, “French Roast: Consumer Response to International Conflict; Evidence from Supermarket Scanner Data.”
It occurred to Pandya that supermarket scanners might offer some firm data on Americans’ buying habits, so she and Venkatesan decided to dig deeper, studying weekly sales in 1,110 U.S. supermarkets in fifty regions across the country. For every week in 2003 they compared each store’s sales of French-sounding brands to that same week in 2002. “Consumers’ often use supermarket brands as an expression of their identity to others and also themselves,” Venkatesan said.
An accurate measure of which brands shoppers perceived to be French was crucial. With more than 8,000 brands across twenty-seven product categories in their data, this was no simple task. A common marketing strategy is to create French-sounding brand names to suggest the product is a French import, capitalizing on shoppers’ normally positive associations of France as a marker of quality and refinement. What normally is an asset, however, became a liability during the Iraq conflict.
