Caliber, a brand reputation analytics and strategy company, polls continuously on many questions, but one’s a lapel-grabber for founder and CEO Shahar Silbershatz. It asks whether respondents would recommend a company. The question is posed to a variety of respondents, meaning that while consumers will interpret the question as whether they’d recommend shopping the brand, others take it differently.
“If I’m a supplier, if I’m an investor, if I’m a regulator or policymaker, recommendation is something that applies to a lot of people, not just to shoppers,” Silbershatz explained to Retail Brew. “It’s a more important metric, simply because it’s more multi-stakeholder.”
In other words, for retailers the response encompasses not just whether consumers would recommend shopping in their stores, but also whether financial planners would recommend their stock, vendors and other brands would recommend them as partners, and employees would recommend working for them.
According to data shared exclusively with Retail Brew, Caliber asked respondents in January whether they agreed with the statement, “I would recommend Target to others,” 49% agreed. But in February, following Target announcing at the end of January that it would eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, the percentage who agreed dropped 11 points, to 38%.
Considering how much coverage Target has received for backtracking on DEI, Silbershatz suggested that’s why Target took such a reputational hit.
“The biggest thing that was reported around Target at that time was the DEI policy, so it’s likely that,” Silbershatz said.
As reputational firms monitor companies that acquiesced to the Trump administration’s demand to dismantle their DEI programs, they’re finding some companies have been hit harder by backlash than others. One getting hit the hardest: Target.
“Adverse reactions”: Target was a full-throated supporter of racial justice and social justice in recent years. Although CEO Brian Cornell recently met with civil rights leader Al Sharpton to discuss the ongoing backlash against the company for retreating on DEI, Target has not directly addressed consumers who are proclaiming on social media that they’re boycotting the retailer or made any statements defending backpedalling on DEI or promising to restore any DEI programs it eliminated.
Reputation scores “reflect people’s expectations,” Silbershatz said. “So when people expect something from you and they don’t get it, then it’s reflected in a movement of a score.”
Other score movement for Target do-you-agree statements after it ended DEI in late January:
- “Target is ethical in the way it conducts its business”—From 65% agreeing with the statement in January, it fell to 60% in February and 58% in March
- “Target behaves responsibly”—From 66% agreeing with the statement in January, it fell to 64% in February and 59% in March
- “Target demonstrates leadership”—From 65% agreeing with the statement in January, it fell to 60% in February and rose to 61% in March
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Target did not respond to Retail Brew’s request for comment on the reputational data. But as the Arizona Republic noted recently, Target did address reputational implications of its DEI switcheroo in the risk-assessment portion of its recently filed Form 10-K.
Explained Target in the form: “We recently announced that we modified and concluded certain of our initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which resulted in adverse reactions from some of our shareholders, guests, team members, and others.”
“They’re flip-flopping”: MAPS Insights is a reputation-management firm that analyzes topical issues and advises marketers and comms teams on how to respond to them. It monitored media coverage and social media commentary about DEI from last July until mid-February for 12 companies that rolled back their DEI programs and six that retained them. In media reports and on social media posts about the topic of DEI, for the DEI backtrackers 34% of the content was negative, compared to 19% for the DEI stalwarts.
But none of the backtrackers MAPS monitored got as bad a thrashing with negative news reports and social media commentary as Target, with 53% of it negative, compared to fellow DEI backtracker Alphabet, with 19% of its DEI coverage negative, and Amazon, with 25% negative.
A post about the findings on MAPS website posits that whether they’re spiking or retaining DEI, the companies that have suffered the least backlash have attributed the decision to “long-term company values, rather than driven by a changing political or ideological environment.”
Target, in contrast, had long espoused the value of diversity, and announced it was eliminating its DEI program four days after Trump took office.
When it comes to DEI, Jasper Snyder, founder and CEO of MAPS, told Retail Brew that there’s a reason that Target is taking it more squarely on the chin than other companies.
“They’re flip-flopping, which is a challenge from a reputational perspective,” Snyder said.
“There’s a snowball effect here,” Silbershatz said, adding Target needs “to understand there’s going to be more and more collateral damage to their reputation, and probably also to their stock price and to the business if they don’t do something about it, because now it’s caught on, and it’s not going to stop.”