About Carrotmob

A Carrotmob campaign is the opposite of a boycott: In order to convince a business to do something, we agree to spend money there to give them a positive incentive (aka a "carrot") in exchange for them agreeing to do what we want that will make the world a better place.

This website was built in 2025 by Brent Schulkin to try out a new form of Carrotmob campaign focused on people around the world making coordinated mass purchases of gift cards. But if you really want to understand Carrotmob you should learn about our history...

When I was in college I did a lot of activism to try and change business behaviors, but I become frustrated that a lot of the tactics used by activists were really negative and ineffective. I began to wonder if there were a better way than yelling at companies at protests, signing petitions, trying to shame them, and so on. If businesses are fundamentally driven by money, what if we just... offered them money? I mean, so many of the biggest problems in the world boil down to this: "Corporations will do anything for money." But what if a big part of the solution is also the fact that corporations will do anything for money? Can we just take control of what they do by giving them money, and then make them do all sorts of good things? I decided to try out this idea, and in 2008 I organized the first ever Carrotmob campaign in San Francisco:

As you can see, it was a big success. That video went viral, and I started hearing from people all over the world who wanted to do the same thing. I started leading a social movement of community organizers around the world.

In order to grow this movement and support these organizers, I worked on building a variety of tech products which helped make organizing easier. We tried out voucher campaigns (kind of like Groupon), an eCommerce integration, and even a partnership with Unilever where we had people buying bigger brands like Ben & Jerry's. To accomplish all this I started two companies and a non-profit, and had help from a variety of teams for about 7 years. We got a lot of attention and both people and businesses both absolutely loved being a part of the Carrotmob movement.

Despite all the success, our unit economics were poor, and we never found a viable, scalable business model. We even tried making Carrotmob a non-profit, but it turns out that's not legal. Eventually we were forced to stop working on it. In 2014 the top organizers in Finland invited me to Helsinki to give a talk about why Carrotmob failed to grow even though everyone loved it so much. What I explained was basically this: In order to grow it, we needed money. In order to get money we needed a believable plan to scale this activity. That means we needed a way to get a lot of people to join us at very low cost. But Carrotmob campaigns were expensive. A person might spend 6 weeks planning an in-person event to get a couple hundred people to show up and spend money. There are a limited number of people who will volunteer to do that. And if you pay people, where does the money come from when you're trying to send every dollar to a small business? The puzzle seemed unsolvable.

Since then, occasional Carrotmob events have continued to happen, and I've worked on a bunch of projects in the same spirit as Carrotmob. Most recently, I've been developing a community called Hijack Capitalism, and a video series called "How to Hijack Capitalism". As I developed this multifaceted plan for changing the economic system, I realized the role that Carrotmob needs to play in that plan. I have a big long-term vision for this, but I also realized that we could start today by experimenting with a new model, which is different in a few ways:

The world has also changed in a few ways which make me feel like now is the right time to try again:

So that's where we are now. I'd love your feedback, and we are brainstorming new Carrotmob campaign ideas in the Hijack Capitalism app, so please join us!