WMBA 6695 Week 2 Single-Reader Audience Analysis Example

One Reader Before One Word: An Audience Analysis of Ridgeline Uniform's President Ahead of a Request to Approve Route-Planning Software, With Each Fact About Him Turned Into a Decision About the Message

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6695: Communication for Leaders and Managers

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Reader Before One Word: An Audience Analysis of Ridgeline Uniform's President Ahead of a Request to Approve Route-Planning Software, With Each Fact About Him Turned Into a Decision About the Message

The Decision This Analysis Serves

Three weeks from now, the president of Ridgeline Uniform Services will receive my request for $86,000 of first-year money covering route-planning software and six weeks of route rebalancing. The company, a composite built for this course, rents and launders work garments and kitchen linens from a single Columbus plant, running thirty-one delivery routes with roughly 260 people. I manage service operations, which includes the routes. The message has one job: by the end of it, the president should be able to say yes, say no or ask for one specific change, and he should be able to do so by the July 15 budget review.

This analysis profiles that one reader. Each observation ends in a consequence for the message, because a fact about him that changes nothing in the draft does not belong here. Items that failed that test, such as his age and his degree, were cut.

What He Already Knows

He has run the company for nineteen years and drove Route 7 himself for three summers in college. He knows every route by number, most drivers by name and the largest customers personally.

Consequence: the message will not explain how routes work, what a stop is or why drivers run long on Fridays. Any explanation of the operation would read as if I thought he did not know his own business. In experiments by Camerer et al. (1989), participants who held private information failed to set it aside when predicting what less informed people would do; here the risk runs the other way, of writing for a reader who knows less than he does.

He reads one report closely: the weekly route profit and loss statement, which shows overtime hours, fuel and revenue per route. He does not read the monthly operations dashboard.

Consequence: every number in the message will come from the weekly route report, in its terms and its units. Driver overtime last year was 9,860 hours, about $340,000 at the overtime rate, and he has seen that figure every Monday. A figure from an industry survey would start an argument about method; his own report will not.

What He Will Do With the Message

He will decide, but he will not decide alone. He has said in two staff meetings that he will not change routes without hearing from the senior drivers, and the three with the most seniority have his cell number.

Consequence: the message must anticipate a conversation he will have after reading it. It will say which senior drivers I have already consulted and what each said, including the one who objected. If he hears an objection from a driver that the message did not mention, the request loses credibility.

He also controls the timing. Route changes in the fall would collide with the restaurant season and the hospital contract renewals in October.

Consequence: the message proposes a start date of August 4 and says why, so he does not have to work out the calendar himself.

What He Will Resist, in His Words

"We tried a routing program in 2019, the drivers ignored it, and it cost us a quarter." This is his strongest objection, and it is accurate. The 2019 trial ran for three months, drivers kept their own sequences and the license was dropped.

Consequence: the message names the 2019 trial in its second paragraph, before he can. It explains the one difference that matters: this time the routes would be redrawn with the drivers, stop by stop, before the software is used, rather than handed to them by a program they did not trust. O'Keefe (1999) found in a meta-analysis that messages which raise an opposing argument and answer it tend to persuade better than messages that ignore it, and better than messages that raise it without an answer.

"If I move a driver's stops, I lose the driver." Turnover among route drivers is the thing he fears most, because a new driver costs a season of customer relationships.

Consequence: the message states that no driver loses more than four of his current stops and that pay stays whole during the transition.

"Software companies always promise savings." Consequence: the message gives a savings range, not a single number, and says what result after ninety days would lead me to recommend stopping.

How and Where He Reads

On Tuesdays and Thursdays he visits customers and reads email on his phone between stops, which in practice means the subject line and two or three lines of preview. On Mondays he is at his desk from seven until nine and reads attachments.

Consequence: the email goes out Monday at 6:45 a.m. The subject line carries the request and the amount. The first two lines must stand alone if he reads nothing else. The supporting detail goes in a two-page attachment rather than the body, since he will open attachments only at his desk.

He also prefers to hear important requests in person. Daft and Lengel (1986) argued that richer channels, such as face-to-face conversation, suit messages with more ambiguity, while written channels suit messages that are clear and factual. This request has both parts.

Consequence: the email asks for twenty minutes at the Tuesday route meeting, where the ambiguous part, the drivers' reaction, can be discussed. The written message carries the numbers.

Specification for the Draft

Table 1

Instructions for Writing the Request

Ridgeline Uniform Services and its staff are composite; figures are illustrative of the company's weekly reports.

Doumont (2002) argued that professional communication succeeds when it adapts to its audience, keeps out what does not serve the purpose and repeats the essential point in more than one form. The specification above is an attempt to apply that to one person. Writing it took longer than drafting the message will, and it removed most of what I would otherwise have written.

References

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232-1254. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651

Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science, 32(5), 554-571. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.32.5.554

Doumont, J.-L. (2002). The three laws of professional communication. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 45(4), 291-296. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2002.805164

O'Keefe, D. J. (1999). How to handle opposing arguments in persuasive messages: A meta-analytic review of the effects of one-sided and two-sided messages. Annals of the International Communication Association, 22(1), 209-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1999.11678963