The adage “it’s like riding a bike” has felt mysterious to me most of my life. I have forgotten many complex skills due to time and lack of practice, and I didn’t know how to ride a bike at all until last year, when my friends had a wedding on a Swedish island that cites cycling as its main form of transportation. Thanks to Bike NYC’s adult education classes, I was spared from embarrassment. Today, I am a cautious and fledgling cyclist learning how to share the road with cars and potholes.
Being too anxious to listen to music while biking means that I’m left with a lot of time to contemplate my new responsibilities on two wheels. To the dismay of many cyclists, I am also a car owner—which is how I can tell you that on almost every city street there’s theoretically a set of shared goals: speed, convenience, not killing anyone. But in NYC, getting from point a to point b means navigating a maze of competing interests. I can (and do) traverse the same route in different modalities—often in awe of how quickly my allegiances will change depending on how many wheels I’m in control of. Inside me there are two wolves; their names are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.
Those tasked with reconciling the effects of differently motivated factions are city planners. Two examples of their work, taken from this wonderful interview with the former chief urban designer for the City of New York: (1) Create unexpected alliances, as in the case between bikes and cars in New York: “The best way to make a bike lane safer is to park cars next to it. We moved the parking lane away from the curb and put the bike lane on the sidewalk side of the cars. Now those parked cars act like a buffer.” And (2) Evolve your weakness into uniqueness, as Los Angeles hopes to do: “LA has huge traffic problems. But over time, different neighborhoods have started growing into [different centers]. Now LA is becoming a city of cities…if it succeeds in connecting its nodes through things other than cars, then it's gonna thrive.”
Like city planners, brands must often balance stakeholders and audiences with misaligned needs. For example, during every Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee must harmonize the desires of fans and media rights holders. Fans want to fluidly interact with Olympic content online. Media rights holders want to keep control of where and how people can watch. As a longtime scroller and Olympic fan, I’ve seen this relationship evolve from openly antagonistic to symbiotic. In 2012, when hashtags meant something, #NBCfail took off in response to the network’s lack of live or online streaming options. The Winter Olympics this year were a dramatic shift: “Our mantra all Games long was that our target audience was anybody with a smartphone.”
Other brands can more openly embrace conflict, especially when competing motivations exist within one group. Ryanair masterfully holds up a mirror to travelers’ clashing desires for low-cost fares with high-end amenities, as seen in this TikTok. The authentic adoption of a tongue-in-cheek strategy has worked so well that their most booked seat—11A—is actually a window seat with no windows.
Brands that are unable to adequately manage competing expectations often become cultural villains. After years of failing to organize the relationship between artists, venues, fans, and resellers, Ticketmaster is on everyone’s bad side: “In the matter of outrageous fees charged at concert venues, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America.” The outcome of commuting to this month’s World Cup matches will decide a new public enemy in the fight between FIFA and NJ Transit: so far, canoes might be coming out on top.
If avoiding conflict is unrealistic and there’s no clear right side, perhaps brands can work toward picking the best side in a fight. Three ways brands can more confidently navigate a dispute:
