Turns Out, Tim Cook’s LGBT Rights Activism Helps – Not Hurts – Apple’s Bottom Line

Corporate Responsibility Comes With Benefits

One year ago Indiana and Arkansas were in the midst of a battle between “religious freedom” and LGBT civil rights. So divisive were bills conservative lawmakers had filed that they were making not only national but international news. 

Battle lines were drawn but it really was only when two tech CEOs stepped in that the vast majority of Americans became engaged, siding with equality, not discrimination.

Marc Benioff, CEO of the $4 billion software firm Salesforce, stood up to Indiana lawmakers, threatening to ban his employees from traveling to Indiana and warning lawmakers if the bill passed without LGBT protections he would make sure they felt it.

“We are forced to dramatically reduce our investment in IN based on our employee’s & customer’s outrage over the Religious Freedom Bill,” Benioff tweeted March 25, 2015. “Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination,” he tweeted the following day.

He worked tirelessly in other ways too, reaching out to other CEOs and speaking on the issue to the media frequently.

Benioff was not alone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made a rare and very public admonition in the form of a Washington Post op-ed, “Pro-discrimination ‘religious freedom’ laws are dangerous.” Cook, like Benioff, also had commented several times on Twitter, writing, “Apple is open for everyone. We are deeply disappointed in Indiana’s new law and calling on Arkansas Gov. to veto the similar #HB1228.”

Now, a researcher is concluding that Cook’s LGBT rights activism actually helped, not harmed, his company’s bottom line.

“What we think makes this new is that many CEOs are now speaking out on controversial issues largely unrelated to the bottom line,” Duke business school associate professor Aaron Chatterji tells the Washington Post. “If you’re a businessperson, why would you want to alienate a large percentage of your customers?”

Chatterji and Harvard professor Michael Toffel “ran some online experiments to try to understand the impact of this social activism by CEOs,” the Post’s economics reporter Jeff Guo writes, adding, that the “researchers found that Cook’s activism likely didn’t hurt Apple’s business—instead, it helped.”

When people were told that the Apple CEO had spoken out against Indiana’s religious freedom law, they were more likely to say they intended to buy Apple products in the near future. By contrast, when people were told about one of Tim Cook’s bland opinions on management philosophy, it had little effect on purchase plans.

“It seems that Cook’s gay rights activism particularly motivated people to buy from the company,” the Post concludes.

Now, about all those Apple boycotts conservatives keep threatening…

 

Image by Joao-Pierre Ruth via Flickr and a CC license