The chance to hit pro-cuts businesses where they'll feel it is catching on. Consumer boycotts can be effective, especially in an online age where reputation control is painful for corporates.

Only ten days after business leaders signed a Telegraph letter backing Osborne's cuts, consumers are redefining their notions of ethical business on the local scene.

Ethical business cannot, by definition, cheerlead a widely-criticised cuts programme that threatens jobs, economic recovery and retail and local commerce. Companies with brandnames that become synonymous with unethical business have good reason to feel the fear.

Ethical consumer groups point to - with considerable justification - a proud history of successful buyer pressure. Centuries-old anti-slavery sugar boycotts, the anti-fur trade campaigns of recent decades, consumer boycotts of battery-farmed animals and eggs - ultimately, all had profound effects on public perception and corporate reputation. A sulky corporate response goes down like a cup of the cold proverbial in the viral era.

Coke, for example, will never shake its sniffy 'we want people to drink our soda, not play with it,' response to legendary videos of guys blowing up diet coke by dropping mentos in it. BP will always be a dopey-looking Tony Hayward, corporate recklessness and rotting fish and bird cadavers. Trafigura's appalling efforts to shut down news of its poisoning of innocent people still echoes as corporate history's loudest online backfire.

There's also reason to hope that a boycott will hit the bottom line. Corporates rubbish consumer boycotts and point to healthy stock prices as evidence, but stock prices ain't always the tale. Academics Phillip Leslie and Larry Chavis ran a study about the effect of a consumer boycott of French wine in the US when the French refused to fight in Iraq in 2003.

Chavis and Leslie didn't look at stock prices for French wine. They took point-of-sale scanner data from supermarkets and merchandisers - the 'hard measures of consumer purchasing behaviour" that Stanford News reports. Leslie and Chavis concluded that the boycott meant French wine companies may have lost over a $1oom in US wine sales.

Those are the sorts of numbers pro-cuts businesses need to keep in mind - those numbers, and polls that suggest the majority of people don't support Osborne's cuts, or think cuts proposals are too aggressive, or unfair, or too much too fast. Government rhetoric is one thing. Voter response to it is another. Smart business will be looking at polls very closely about now and making smart calls about public mood - and the fact that Osborne's assault crosses the shopping classes.

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