CEO Activists Use a Variety of Strategies

Activist CEOs often deploy two sorts of techniques, despite the fact that they are driven by a variety of interests—external, internal, and profoundly personal—to raise awareness and leverage economic power.

Increasing public awareness.
This often entails making public statements—often in the news media, but increasingly on Twitter—in order to gain support for social movements and aid in the implementation of change. When corporate executives make such remarks, they are expressing to stakeholders their positions on a wide range of problems that would not have been on the CEO’s radar a generation ago. For example, numerous CEOs have collaborated to increase awareness in various instances. As an example, just days before the United Nations climate-change negotiations began in late 2015 in Paris, the CEOs of 14 major food companies—Mars, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone Dairy North America, Hershey, Ben & Jerry’s, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Nestlé USA, New Belgium Brewing, Hain Celestial, Stonyfield Farm, and Clif Bar—signed an open letter urging world leaders to craft

Making use of one’s economic strength.
Some of the more effective instances of CEO activism have been applying economic pressure on governments in order to prevent them from passing or overturning laws.
What is the effectiveness of these approaches? Due to the fact that the trend of corporate executives taking a public statement on topics that are not necessarily connected to their company is new, there is little empirical proof of its influence.

Reference : Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel -A playbook for polarized political times (Harvard Business Review – January–February 2018)