In the Creating a Tableau Story recipe, we discovered that a third of milk carton buyers know about the possibility of recycling, but still dispose of the packaging in the standard garbage bins. Also, we know that almost half of the milk buyers don't even know about the possibility of recycling the milk cartons. At this point, we are in the conflict phase as we should decide on where to focus our efforts. Should we investigate those who do not know about the recycling potential or those who are aware but are not willing to support it?
When we are making decisions such as this, it is always important to keep our audience in mind. Telling a Story always requires taking the perspective of your listener. In this case, our listener is a public relations (PR) manager of a milk manufacturing company. We need to step into their shoes and put their glasses on. Let’s try to figure out what our PR manager can do about the fact that every third person that knows about recycling is possibly not motivated to practice it. As a PR manager, we can try to think of ways to motivate those people. For example, we could organize a lottery game or give a discount to those who dispose of their garbage in specialized garbage bins. However, it is much more likely that we would focus on people who don’t know about the recycling possibility yet.
Considering the tools that we have at our disposal, raising awareness seems to be a more achievable goal than a direct change of behavior. Furthermore, as a PR manager, we would want to know the reasons for the relative failure of our current campaign. Maybe we still can fix something and turn it into a success, or at least avoid the trap in the future. It is important to remember that another stakeholder in the same situation would probably have a different perspective, plan a different strategy, and take different steps in solving the problem. Let’s go back to our PR manager and see what we can do about our data to help them out.