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:
Name your actual values. Not "we serve everyone" but "here's who we prioritize and why." Figma's growth strategy was built on a clear sequencing of who came first: win designers with a best-in-class design tool, then let designers become internal champions who pulled in PMs and engineers. They didn't try to serve the whole product team from day one—they named their person, earned their trust, and expanded from there.
Consider: Who are you actually making decisions for when it gets hard?
Own your trade-offs. Be honest about what your choices cost someone else—and who absorbs the cost. When a former Costco CEO tried to raise the price of the $1.50 hot dog combo in response to rising costs, co-founder Jim Sinegal shut it down: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." Current CEO Ron Vachris has said it plainly to investors: "We will never succumb to not being the best price. That's what Costco is known for. That will always be our leading mantra."
Consider: What are you willing to lose to stay consistent with what you stand for?
Know when transparency hit its limits. Brands navigating competing audiences often reach for transparency as the solution. But Harvard's Deepak Malhotra and Michael Pirson studied stakeholder trust across four organizations and found transparency was the only factor with no effect on trust for any stakeholder group. A Porsche case study illustrates why: when the German Stock Exchange introduced mandatory quarterly reporting, Porsche refused, arguing the reports would misrepresent its cyclical business. It got dropped from the mid-cap index and its stock fell 40%. But within four months the stock had fully recovered—and investors named Porsche's CEO the most popular in Germany that year. Transparency without substance is just noise.
Consider: Where is your brand using transparency as a substitute for having a point of view?
The brands that endure aren't the ones that make everyone happy. In a world of competing interests, you get better at clarifying your priorities and finding the balance—just like riding a bike.
About The Writer
Andrea Villena is a Lead Strategist living in Brooklyn. She loves ice cream.