for Catherine
volepate
102_opov_targeting.docxThinking about audience and opposing viewpoints (OPOV)
Let’s use an example that we should all be familiar with.
Unless you’re a student who has never visited campus, you’ll know that the vast majority of students do not bike to class. I don’t have the numbers, but I’d estimate close to 90%, perhaps 95% of students do not bike to class, this as evidenced by the parking space available at the bike racks at virtually any hour of day, in any weather, during any given semester. The bike parking changes only vaguely between the beginning and end of any semester, with the least amount of space available in the first four weeks (when registration and attendance are still high) of the Fall semester.
I know this because I bike to campus more often than I ride the bus, and I drive to campus less than ten times every year. Even when I ride the bus, I’ll pay attention to how many bikes have been parked that day. Biking culture is very important to me.
Any reasonable person should understand that biking to campus would help solve or mitigate any number of problems, not least of which is a public health problem. The college, however, is not motivated to encourage biking (not really), and the local culture does not value biking. It’s just not part of our local ethos to look at the bicycle as a viable mode of transport. Some people even look down on cyclists, questioning their masculinity, sanity, associating them with all sorts of snobbery, even treating them aggressively. At minimum, cyclists are not viewed as problem solvers but simply as people who enjoy an activity.
So, let’s imagine that we were assigned the task of increasing the amount of students who bike to campus. Success would be measured by any increase, even 1%. How would we go about this task?
Obviously, we’d need to communicate with students (our audience) and get them to shift their current opinion (OPOV) to the one we’d like them to adopt (POV). This is to say we want them to change their minds and behavior. Notice, the OPOV and audience in this case are identical elements.
Let’s compare these arguments (I’m using hyperlinks instead of citations):
1
Those students who live within district and return home after class should think about biking to campus. Biking is a great way to gain exercise. Biking also cuts down on pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, overall petroleum consumption, and it frees up valuable space in urban areas that would otherwise be used to park cars. Beyond these things, biking helps students save money, as they’ll cut down on gas, or they might find they don’t need a car at all.
The amount students save is significant. A perfectly good new bike can be purchased for under $260 , compared to an average used car, whose prices have been climbing in recent years, and now top out at over $18,000 . Obviously, students are probably not going to pay so much, but the cheapest possible used car should cost around $1,000 , and will certainly require maintenance, insurance, etc. The only cost associated with a bike is a yearly tune up, and occasional replacement of tires. Most of that maintenance can be done by the owner with only minimal training, and it should not cost more than a few hundred dollars each year. While bikes can be insured, insurance isn’t mandated, and in the case of an accident, a cyclist is almost never liable. In Illinois, a cyclist is considered a pedestrian.
Therefore, students really need to look at this as an investment in themselves and their community instead of a simple pastime. The money saved on transport can be invested in one’s education or recreation, or simply saved for future expenses or investments.
2
According to surveys conducted by English 101 students in the Spring 2016 semester, most students do not bike to campus because they’re concerned by the amount of time they’ll lose. While they expressed other concerns, like personal safety and the danger of the roads, the most common response suggested students perceive driving to be faster than biking.
They’re not wrong. Biking does, in fact, take more time than driving. However, the amount of time students save is often negligible. Driving impacts the environment negatively, raises the cost of transport and offers commuters few advantages across short distances. Especially when the weather is mild, all students would gain advantages by biking to campus while losing only a fraction of the time they think they’d be saving.
According to the Office of Admissions and Records, the average student lives about 2 miles from campus. If we plot a course to campus using Google Maps from a distance of over 2 miles, for example from the Metra Station in Berwyn, we’ll find the software calculates a drive lasting about 6-7 minutes. In contrast, a bike ride from the same location, calculated on side roads, requires 13-14 minutes. So a student biking from the neighborhood surrounding MacNeal Hospital would lose about seven minutes, but gain advantages to their personal health, cost savings, all while helping to keep a car off the road, reduce impact on the environment, and help to control congestion and make more parking available for those students (working moms, for example) who come to campus from outside our district.
Experienced bikers claim that the time it takes to get to campus is affected by time of day. During the morning and evening rush, biking is in some cases even faster than driving, especially for those students who live near grammar schools where traffic can get extremely congested. Those students who bike home from campus after 2:00 PM communicate that they routinely catch up to the cars that pass them on streets like East Avenue or Ridgeland. Cars only perceive themselves as driving faster than the bikes, but then end up waiting by traffic lights or trains when the bikes catch up. Driving is, generally speaking, only substantially faster over longer distances, and most students live relatively close to campus.
If you’re one of those students who keeps from biking because you think you’d lose valuable time, reconsider. We might lose more time texting our friends or browsing social media than we would by caring for our environment and health by biking to class. Those of us who do not need to drive across the city to work after class should really bike to campus more often, especially when the weather is good.
Both of these arguments do one thing well: they limit audience. The first one limits the audience to “students who live within district and return home after class”. However, that’s really the only skilled move that student makes. The rest of that argument POINTS OUT THE OBVIOUS. You neither need to read anything or talk to anyone to know all the stuff that essay points out. You certainly don’t need a college class to think from that point of view. People who don’t know that biking is cheaper than driving have problems much greater than what college can solve, and no amount of data from the Chicago Tribune is going to help them. An adult who does not know that biking equals exercise is unfortunate. I can’t imagine that person is taking classes at College.
The second argument does something precise and skilled: it targets an audience not by identifying them by name but by figuring out what idea or perception is interfering with behavior. That’s called appealing to the OPOV. Instead of telling someone what we want them to do, we think about why they are not doing it. Then we speak to that. Usually, figuring this out requires some reading or investigation, and so that English 101 class asked 100 students why they didn’t bike to campus. When fifteen students asked 100, we had a pool of well over 520 students (because there was overlap), which is a significant number on a campus of only 4,000 students. In short, we ended up asking 13% of the population why they behaved one way and not another. That’s really good.
Clearly, we don’t need to address those students who already bike to campus. We also don’t need to speak to students who can’t bike to campus (because after class they have to get to work in Evanston or Beverly, for example). We target the population in position to be affected.
Now, an even stronger argument would forget about the student population completely and instead target Student Activities, the PR Department or some other entity on campus that could be convinced to share our ethos and communicate to large groups of people in an effort to influence them. We’d just share our findings with them, all while we figured out why they have not been communicating this kind of thing to students.
Years ago, we successfully had the college move the bike racks to a part of campus where the bikes would be protected from rain. We did it by appealing to the campus police, who were interested in cutting down on car traffic on campus. They agreed and were able to influence the physical plant to move the racks. Without our input, they would never have thought about it because they did not have the ethos of a cyclist.
This is the difference between arguing to the ether and targeting an audience. The people we communicate with have positions and values. They are not ill-informed, idiots, corrupt bastards or “out for profit”. The “out for profit” argument is a double edge sword. Why are most of us attending college? Could it be that we hope to earn less than we’re earning right now?
Pollan addresses a consumer. However, he’s not addressing a consumer that gets her information from misinformed neighbors. Pollan makes assumptions about the readers’ accurate knowledge of history, economics, public health and the reciprocal nature of problems. We’re allowed to make the same assumptions he does because we’re writing to college students and graduates. Frankly, if our readers don’t know what the Industrial Revolution was, that’s their problem, not ours. At the same time, if we don’t know the basics of supply and demand laws, that’s kind of our problem, and we’d need to do something about it.
We have to remember that these industries and governments we like to rip are human entities. General Mills currently employs 39,000 people. Who knows what amount of people worldwide invest in General Mills stock. There are people whose retirement savings will be determined by the success of a company like that. So we shake a finger at it very carefully, aware of what it means to call somebody evil and careless when they’re selling a sugary cereal alongside a perfectly healthy one. Why is it General Mills’ fault that shoppers in Cicero have purchased Cocoa Puffs to feed to their children? Curiously, General Mills went and acquired Cascadian Farms, an organic food producer, exactly because they noticed there’s a market for this, and that the market was growing. Instead of producing their own brand to complete, they just went out and bought one that was already in business. Smart, right?
If we perceive the world in black and white terms, with “evil companies” in one corner and “good poor people” in the other, we’re going to run aground, and our arguments are going to become very easy to defeat, primarily because they perceive an oversimplified view of the world. There is no simple solution to a complex problem.
This does not mean that the food industry deserves criticism. It does, and Pollan offers us a scathing one, just as he criticizes us for having flawed or incomplete beliefs. A problem solver is skilled when s/he does not separate the perception too far away from the problem. In most cases, problems exist because groups of people harbor limited or flawed perceptions of relationships. A skilled problem solver understands those perceptions first in order to speak to them.
