What is a good alternative for the reverse of a boycott?

Boycotting is a classic consumer strategy to, in a sense, vote with your feet or with your dollar against some business that is doing something you find troubling, whether integral to the business, like slaughtering practices for meat, or incidental, like personal ethics violations by management.

But there is a practice that is the reverse for this, that is, providing additional support or changing brands to a business that does good things, changing business practices to acceptable ones, or giving to charities you approve. In the end, rewarding the company for activity that you like.

Is there a good term that captures this 'opposite' of boycotting?

Dictionaries specify 'support' as the antonym, but that word is much too broad to correspond well with 'boycott'. There are other terms: 'sanction' (an auto-antonym), 'encourage patronage' (probably the most exact but a bit of a mouthful)

Obviously the best corresponding word would be just as snappy as 'boycott': 'reverse boycott' (but still possible negative), 'to santa clause' (like a gift?).

Can you make a case for these or other suggestions?

Solution 1:

Procott has been used, on both sides of the Atlantic:

Procott or boycott?

I quote at length only because it's relevant to the question:

Then there’s the procott. The opposite of a boycott, (according to a coordinating website that seems to have disappeared) a procott “is a movement to support the production and purchase of earth-friendly and justice-friendly goods and services.”

I first ran across the term in Utne Reader’s “Good Idea” contest in 2002. Instead of not buying products as a protest, procotts encourage people to buy products and services that help bring about good...

Something happened to the word procott; a web search finds almost nothing, just a few blog posts and a dog shampoo. It’s like someone sent out a “cease and desist”—the dog shampoo people!? Or maybe it just didn’t take. I like the term and we should use it. It’s the alternative to unconscious consuming. When we tune in to the effects of our buying power we help create a better world.

By "dog shampoo people" the author is referring to an actual product called Procott Dog Shampoo.

At any rate, one can find other uses of the term:

How they reached that conclusion and that having a “procott” (basically, the opposite of a boycott where everyone buys a certain product on a certain day) was, to put it gently, unscientific at best, but there was definitely heart behind their ideas!

(Tuxedo Unmasked)

Don't boycott – procott instead.

(The Guardian)

I'm not sure if pro is used as in the opposite of con but one could make the case it's taken from the word promote, which contains the idea of 'providing additional support':

1 Support or actively encourage (a cause, venture, etc.); further the progress of:
‘Do you promote recycling as a form of responsible waste disposal?’

1.1 Give publicity to (a product, organization, or venture) so as to increase sales or public awareness:
‘they are using famous personalities to promote the library nationally’

(promote, Oxford dictionary)

As such this word provides an alternative.

Solution 2:

A fairly new term is "Cash Mob," a play on the "Flash Mob" form of performance art, but with a purposeful and economic slant.

Unfortunately I don't have good sources for this, only Wikipedia:

A cash mob is a group of people who assemble at a local business to make purchases. The purpose of these mobs is to support both the local businesses and the overall community. They may also serve a secondary purpose in providing social opportunities... The cash mob is related to the carrotmob, which supports companies for ethical, mainly pro-environmental actions.

"Carrotmob" appears to be an actual non-profit organization that calls their actions "buycotts," which apparently is interchangeable with "anti-boycott."

It uses buycotts (a form of consumer activism where a community buys a lot of goods from one company in a small time period) to reward a business's commitment to making socially responsible changes to the business. Carrotmob also refers to a global movement[2] of community organizers who use the Carrotmob tactic of consumer activism as a way to help change businesses in their communities.

Edit: As Mari-LouA mentions in the comments, the definition for carrot mob can be found in the MacMillan Dictionary and has added depth when juxtaposed with the idiom "carrot or stick," an approach of coaxing behavior using incentives and/or punishment.

Cash mobs don't seem to require ethical actions by a corporation, but rather a consensus to support a corporation for any reason whatsoever.

So be it a buycott, anti-boycott, cash mob, or Carrotmob, they all strive to reward companies that have positive impacts on the communities they serve.

Carrotmob seems to be the best antonym of boycott due to the requirement of ethical corporate actions, with cash mob being a broad show of support for a company or its employees, and buycott/anti-boycott being the concurrent opposition to a boycott depending on which Wikipedia page you read.