Of course it won't. Otherwise the advertising industry wouldn't exist.
More than that. In general, the market rewards being asshole and borderline fraudster. Reputation is a thing within smaller groups, but what matters is primarily reputation related to your behavior towards your peers in that group. And if your peer group is composed of assholes, then being an asshole is a positive trait as long as you're not an asshole towards members of that group.
Another thing: when you're a no-name upstart, reputation matters little because nobody knows you. When you're a large, successful business, any bad reputation can be compensated by proportionate spending on PR and advertising.
Yet another thing: in B2C, consumers often don't have a meaningful choice. An individual is juggling a lot of different priorities in their lives, not least of which is "saving money" and "buying stuff one likes". So e.g. Coca-Cola does a pretty lot of evil stuff, but people have strong taste preferences in the product category Coca-Cola sells, so nobody really boycotts them. Or, pretty much every major brand of smartphones is doing evil things, and every major telco provider is filled with assholes - yet as a citizen of the western world, I really do need to have a smartphone. So I have to choose someone. Or, a grocery store next to the place I used to live would wash stale meat with detergent and sell as fresh. This lands straight into asshole category, but I still went there, because a) it was the closest store, and b) I have no guarantee other stores don't do the same (and plenty of reasons to suspect they do).
And yet another thing: taking VC investments; when investors come knocking for their returns, plenty of startups are forced to become assholes.
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TL;DR: The market rewards assholes. If you're not an asshole, your competitors will force you to either become one, or get marginalized. There's an excellent essay that goes into details about the mechanics of that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
More than that. In general, the market rewards being asshole and borderline fraudster. Reputation is a thing within smaller groups, but what matters is primarily reputation related to your behavior towards your peers in that group. And if your peer group is composed of assholes, then being an asshole is a positive trait as long as you're not an asshole towards members of that group.
Another thing: when you're a no-name upstart, reputation matters little because nobody knows you. When you're a large, successful business, any bad reputation can be compensated by proportionate spending on PR and advertising.
Yet another thing: in B2C, consumers often don't have a meaningful choice. An individual is juggling a lot of different priorities in their lives, not least of which is "saving money" and "buying stuff one likes". So e.g. Coca-Cola does a pretty lot of evil stuff, but people have strong taste preferences in the product category Coca-Cola sells, so nobody really boycotts them. Or, pretty much every major brand of smartphones is doing evil things, and every major telco provider is filled with assholes - yet as a citizen of the western world, I really do need to have a smartphone. So I have to choose someone. Or, a grocery store next to the place I used to live would wash stale meat with detergent and sell as fresh. This lands straight into asshole category, but I still went there, because a) it was the closest store, and b) I have no guarantee other stores don't do the same (and plenty of reasons to suspect they do).
And yet another thing: taking VC investments; when investors come knocking for their returns, plenty of startups are forced to become assholes.
--
TL;DR: The market rewards assholes. If you're not an asshole, your competitors will force you to either become one, or get marginalized. There's an excellent essay that goes into details about the mechanics of that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.