Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.
A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that, “Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”
A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions).
Then, the company added some cyber-insurance for itself, with the strengthening of a so-called ‘protection agreement’ it had previously purchased from the search engine Baidu, China’s Google. Baidu had long finessed its internet searches for the Chinese government, to block commentary critical of the Communist Party. It sold the same service to commercial clients, in the case of Sanlu for rmb 3 million, to limit or screen out searches linking the company’s products to sick babies and melamine. (Baidu later denied selling this agreement.)
The Party’s genius has been its leaders’ ability in the last three decades to maintain the political institutions and authoritarian powers of old-style communism, while dumping the ideological straitjacket that inspired them.
‘As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.’
It is no coincidence that the Vatican is one of the few states with which China has been unable to establish diplomatic ties since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The city-state, which is the administrative centre of the Catholic Church and the home of the Pope, is the only other organization of comparable dimensions to the Chinese Communist Party, albeit on a global scale, and with a similar addiction to ritual and secrecy. The Party guards the command of its catechism as zealously and self-righteously as the Vatican defends its authority over the faith.
