By Quisto Settle
Public opinion gets a lot of attention. You’ll see it in the news, you’ll hear it from politicians, and you’ll have it shared from your friendly, neighborhood PIE Center.
But why should we care about public opinion?
Because it drives decisions.
In business, public opinion matters because it affects the bottom line. Businesses are selling a product. If the public doesn’t like the product, the business fails. So businesses engage in consumer research.
They want to know what types of products the public wants/needs. They want to know what characteristics will get the public to select product A over product B. And on a broader scale, they want to know what the public thinks of the organization’s brand and how that impacts perceptions of the organization’s products.
Where you hear about public opinion the most, though, is related to politics and public policy. Election years lead to public opinion polls inundating the news media. We see evaluations of candidates, political parties, specific policies, and public organizations.
The importance of public opinion in public policy doesn’t have a bottom line effect, but it does touch on a core concept of public policy. Public policy is implicitly enacted on behalf of the public. There is a need to understand public opinion so the policies that are implemented reflect the public’s desires. When the public is unhappy, new politicians get elected who change the policies.
For any group or industry to be successful, it needs to satisfy three types of sustainability. It has to be economically sustainable (i.e., needs to support itself financially), it has to be environmentally sustainable (i.e., it can’t deplete natural resources to a point that the industry loses viability), and it has to be socially sustainable (i.e., the public has to be supportive of what the industry does).
Understanding public opinion is a key cog in reaching social sustainability.
The PIE Center evaluates public opinion through research so that public and private organizations in agriculture and natural resources understand what the public desires instead of guessing what the public desires.
