The impact of CEO Activism in Brand Reputation:

the PROZIS case.

Résumé

Citizens are ever more demanding companies to take a stand on controversial socio-political issues. But CEOs face a great dilemma, as their opinions are simultaneously from a citizen and from a leader, with no clear frontiers.

After posted a personal opinion welcoming the revoke law that protected the right to abortion, Prozis’ CEO created a case that dominated the trends in social media in Portugal for weeks. As a result, Prozis has suffered numerous censorships, cancellations of contracts with influencers who didn’t want to be associated to these statements, as well as thousands of ordinary people who publicly assumed that would stop consuming Prozis’ products and unfollowed the brand on social networks.

Based on a quantitative approach (n=550), through an online questionnaire, this study concluded that although 69.1% of the participants disagree or strongly disagree with Prozis’ CEO statements, 73.5% think that any CEO has the right to publicly express his opinions. Also, more than ¾ consider that Prozis’ reputation has been affected by those statements, but more than half (51.6%) stated that they did not stop (or would stop) buying Prozis’ products. A significative difference was found as only 34.7% of Baby Boomers assumed stopped buying Prozis’ products, while 58.5% of Gen Z did it.