GETTING COMPANIES TO PECK THE RIGHT BUTTON

Activist campaigns that target corporations conventionally focus on trying to change the operational practices of those companies which in many cases will, by extension, impact the broader society. What we are trying to do is to elevate this approach to the level of how companies use their political influence. Corporations lobby governments to secure policies favorable to their businesses; often even if those policies are unfavorable to the general public.

Our contention is that, as their consumer constituencies, we have the right to expect companies to use their political influence in ways that reflect and address our concerns, our values, and so on. Of course, we do not expect that they will feel obliged by our mere belief that we should be represented and that our interests should be served when they exercise their influence. We recognise that the only way to democratize their influence is by translating our demands into the binary language of corporate profitability.

In other words, we do not expect them to take the actions we want them to take simply because those actions are moral, just, or right; no, we have to create a profit-driven reason for them to take moral, just, and right actions.

This is a matter of operant conditioning. When researchers trained pigeons to correctly distinguish between paintings by Chagall and Van Gogh by rewarding them with grain when they pecked the right button, they did not create art connoisseurs, they just taught the pigeons a new set of conditions for earning food. We are not imagining that we can transform corporations into morally-driven entities, but we can teach them a new set of conditions for earning our customer loyalty. They will peck the right button for the same reasons the pigeons did, but their reasons are irrelevant as long as the desired result is achieved.