Coming up with creative ideas is easy; selling them to
strangers is hard. All too often, entrepreneurs, sales executives, and
marketing managers go to great lengths to show how their new business plans or
creative concepts are practical and high margin—only to be rejected by
corporate decision makers who don’t seem to understand the real value of the
ideas. Why does this happen?
It turns out that the problem has as much to do with
the seller’s traits as with an idea’s inherent quality. The person on the
receiving end tends to gauge the pitcher’s creativity as well as the proposal
itself. And judgments about the pitcher’s ability to come up with workable
ideas can quickly and permanently overshadow perceptions of the idea’s worth.
We all like to think that people judge us carefully and objectively on our
merits. But the fact is, they rush to place us into neat little categories—they
stereotype us. So the first thing to realize when you’re preparing to make a
pitch to strangers is that your audience is going to put you into a box. And
they’re going to do it really fast. Research suggests that humans can
categorize others in less than 150 milliseconds. Within 30 minutes, they’ve
made lasting judgments about your character.
These insights emerged from my lengthy study of the
$50 billion U.S. film and television industry. Specifically, I worked with 50
Hollywood executives involved in assessing pitches from screenwriters. Over the
course of six years, I observed dozens of 30-minute pitches in which the
screenwriters encountered the “catchers” for the first time. In interviewing
and observing the pitchers and catchers, I was able to discern just how quickly
assessments of creative potential are made in these high-stakes exchanges. (The
deals that arise as a result of successful screenplay pitches are often
multimillion-dollar projects, rivaling in scope the development of new car
models by Detroit’s largest automakers and marketing campaigns by New York’s
most successful advertising agencies.) To determine whether my observations
applied to business settings beyond Hollywood, I attended a variety of
product-design, marketing, and venture-capital pitch sessions and conducted
interviews with executives responsible for judging creative, high-stakes ideas
from pitchers previously unknown to them. In those environments, the results
were remarkably similar to what I had seen in the movie business.
People on the receiving end of pitches have no formal,
verifiable, or objective measures for assessing that elusive trait, creativity.
Catchers—even the expert ones—therefore apply a set of subjective and often inaccurate
criteria very early in the encounter, and from that point on, the tone is set.
If a catcher detects subtle cues indicating that the pitcher isn’t creative,
the proposal is toast. But that’s not the whole story. I’ve discovered that
catchers tend to respond well if they are made to feel that they are
participating in an idea’s development.
The pitchers who do this successfully are those who
tend to be categorized by catchers into one of three prototypes. I call them
the showrunner, the artist, and the neophyte. Showrunners come off as
professionals who combine creative inspiration with production know-how.
Artists appear to be quirky and unpolished and to prefer the world of creative
ideas to quotidian reality. Neophytes tend to be—or act as if they were—young,
inexperienced, and naive. To involve the audience in the creative process,
showrunners deliberately level the power differential between themselves and
their catchers; artists invert the differential; and neophytes exploit it. If
you’re a pitcher, the bottom-line implication is this: By successfully
projecting yourself as one of the three creative types and getting your catcher
to view himself or herself as a creative collaborator, you can improve your
chances of selling an idea.
My research also has implications for those who buy
ideas: Catchers should beware of relying on stereotypes. It’s all too easy to
be dazzled by pitchers who ultimately can’t get their projects off the ground,
and it’s just as easy to overlook the creative individuals who can make good on
their ideas. That’s why it’s important for the catcher to test every pitcher, a
matter we’ll return to in the following pages.
The Sorting Hat
In the late 1970s, psychologists Nancy Cantor and
Walter Mischel, then at Stanford University, demonstrated that we all use sets
of stereotypes—what they called “person prototypes”—to categorize strangers in
the first moments of interaction. Though such instant typecasting is arguably
unfair, pattern matching is so firmly hardwired into human psychology that only
conscious discipline can counteract it.
Yale University creativity researcher Robert Sternberg
contends that the prototype matching we use to assess originality in others
results from our implicit belief that creative people possess certain
traits—unconventionality, for example, as well as intuitiveness, sensitivity,
narcissism, passion, and perhaps youth. We develop these stereotypes through
direct and indirect experiences with people known to be creative, from
personally interacting with the 15-year-old guitar player next door to hearing
stories about Pablo Picasso.
When a person we don’t know pitches an idea to us, we
search for visual and verbal matches with those implicit models, remembering
only the characteristics that identify the pitcher as one type or another. We
subconsciously award points to people we can easily identify as having creative
traits; we subtract points from those who are hard to assess or who fit
negative stereotypes.
In hurried business situations in which executives
must evaluate dozens of ideas in a week, or even a day, catchers are rarely
willing to expend the effort necessary to judge an idea more objectively. Like
Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat, they classify pitchers in a matter of seconds. They
use negative stereotyping to rapidly identify the no-go ideas. All you have to
do is fall into one of four common negative stereotypes, and the pitch session
will be over before it has begun. (For more on these stereotypes, see the
sidebar “How to Kill Your Own Pitch.”) In fact, many such sessions are strictly
a process of elimination; in my experience, only 1% of ideas make it beyond the
initial pitch.
How to Kill Your Own Pitch
Before
you even get to the stage in the pitch where the catcher categorizes you as a
particular creative type, you have to avoid some dangerous pigeonholes: the
four negative stereotypes that are guaranteed to kill a pitch. And take care,
because negative cues carry more weight than positive ones.
The pushover would rather unload an idea than defend it.
(“I could do one of these in red, or if you don’t like that, I could do it in
blue.”) One venture capitalist I spoke with offered the example of an
entrepreneur who was seeking funding for a computer networking start-up. When
the VCs raised concerns about an aspect of the device, the pitcher simply
offered to remove it from the design, leading the investors to suspect that the
pitcher didn’t really care about his idea.
The robot presents a proposal too formulaically, as if
it had been memorized from a how-to book. Witness the entrepreneur who responds
to prospective investors’ questions about due diligence and other business
details with canned answers from his PowerPoint talk.
The used-car salesman is that obnoxious, argumentative character too
often deployed in consultancies and corporate sales departments. One vice
president of marketing told me the story of an arrogant consultant who put in a
proposal to her organization. The consultant’s offer was vaguely intriguing,
and she asked him to revise his bid slightly. Instead of working with her, he
argued with her. Indeed, he tried selling the same package again and again,
each time arguing why his proposal would produce the most astonishing
bottom-line results the company had ever seen. In the end, she grew so tired of
his wheedling insistence and inability to listen courteously to her feedback
that she told him she wasn’t interested in seeing any more bids from him.
The charity case is needy; all he or she wants is a job. I
recall a freelance consultant who had developed a course for executives on how
to work with independent screenwriters. He could be seen haunting the halls of
production companies, knocking on every open door, giving the same pitch. As
soon as he sensed he was being turned down, he began pleading with the catcher,
saying he really,really needed to fill some
slots to keep his workshop going.
Unfortunately for pitchers, type-based elimination is
easy, because negative impressions tend to be more salient and memorable than
positive ones. To avoid fast elimination, successful pitchers—only 25% of those
I have observed—turn the tables on the catchers by enrolling them in the
creative process. These pitchers exude passion for their ideas and find ways to
give catchers a chance to shine. By doing so, they induce the catchers to judge
them as likable collaborators. Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer
Oliver Stone told me that the invitation to collaborate on an idea is a
“seduction.” His advice to screenwriters pitching an idea to a producer is to
“pull back and project what he needs onto your idea in order to make the story
whole for him.” The three types of successful pitchers have their own
techniques for doing this, as we’ll see.
The Showrunner
In the corporate world, as in Hollywood, showrunners
combine creative thinking and passion with what Sternberg and Todd Lubart,
authors of Defying the Crowd:
Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity, call
“practical intelligence”—a feel for which ideas are likely to contribute to the
business. Showrunners tend to display charisma and wit in pitching, say, new
design concepts to marketing, but they also demonstrate enough technical
know-how to convince catchers that the ideas can be developed according to
industry-standard practices and within resource constraints. Though they may
not have the most or the best ideas, showrunners are those rare people in
organizations who see the majority of their concepts fully implemented.
An example of a showrunner is the legendary
kitchen-gadget inventor and pitchman Ron Popeil. Perfectly coiffed and
handsome, Popeil is a combination design master and ringmaster. In his New Yorker account of Popeil’s phenomenally
successful Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, Malcolm Gladwell described how
Popeil fuses entertainment skills—he enthusiastically showcases the product as
an innovation that will “change your life”—with business savvy. For his
television spots, Popeil makes sure that the chickens are roasted to exactly
the resplendent golden brown that looks best on camera. And he designed the
rotisserie’s glass front to reduce glare, so that to the home cook, the
revolving, dripping chickens look just as they do on TV.
The first Hollywood pitcher I observed was a
showrunner. The minute he walked into the room, he scored points with the
studio executive as a creative type, in part because of his new, pressed jeans,
his fashionable black turtleneck, and his nice sport coat. The clean hair
draping his shoulders showed no hint of gray. He had come to pitch a weekly
television series based on the legend of Robin Hood. His experience as a
marketer was apparent; he opened by mentioning an earlier TV series of his that
had been based on a comic book. The pitcher remarked that the series had
enjoyed some success as a marketing franchise, spawning lunch boxes, bath toys,
and action figures.
Showrunners
deliberately level the power differential between themselves and their
catchers; artists invert the differential; and neophytes exploit it.
Showrunners create a level playing field by engaging
the catcher in a kind of knowledge duet. They typically begin by getting the
catcher to respond to a memory or some other subject with which the showrunner
is familiar. Consider this give-and-take:
Pitcher: Remember Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood?
Catcher: Oh, yeah. One of my all-time favorites as a
kid.
Pitcher: Yes, it was classic. Then, of course, came
Costner’s version.
Catcher: That was much darker. And it didn’t evoke as
much passion as the original.
Pitcher: But the special effects were great.
Catcher: Yes, they were.
Pitcher: That’s the twist I want to include in this
new series.
Catcher: Special effects?
Pitcher: We’re talking a science fiction version of Robin Hood. Robin has a sorcerer in his
band of merry men who can conjure up all kinds of scary and wonderful spells.
Catcher: I love it!
The pitcher sets up his opportunity by leading the
catcher through a series of shared memories and viewpoints. Specifically, he
engages the catcher by asking him to recall and comment on familiar movies.
With each response, he senses and then builds on the catcher’s knowledge and
interest, eventually guiding the catcher to the core idea by using a word
(“twist”) that’s common to the vocabularies of both producers and
screenwriters.
Showrunners also display an ability to improvise, a
quality that allows them to adapt if a pitch begins to go awry. Consider the
dynamic between the creative director of an ad agency and a prospective client,
a major television sports network. As Mallorre Dill reported in a 2001 Adweekarticle on award-winning
advertising campaigns, the network’s VP of marketing was seeking help with a
new campaign for coverage of the upcoming professional basketball season, and
the ad agency was invited to make a pitch. Prior to the meeting, the network
executive stressed to the agency that the campaign would have to appeal to
local markets across the United States while achieving “street credibility
The agency’s creative director and its art director
pitched the idea of digitally inserting two average teenagers into video of an
NBA game. Initially, the catcher frowned on the idea, wondering aloud if
viewers would find it arrogant and aloof. So the agency duo ad-libbed a rap
that one teen could recite after scoring on all-star Shaquille O’Neal: “I’m
fresh like a can of picante. And I’m deeper than Dante in the circles of hell.”
The catcher was taken aback at first; then he laughed. Invited to participate
in the impromptu rap session, the catcher began inserting his own lines. When
the fun was over, the presenters repitched their idea with a slight
variation—inserting the teenagers into videos of home-team games for local
markets—and the account was sold to the tune of hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
Real showrunners are rare—only 20% of the successful
pitchers I observed would qualify. Consequently, they are in high demand, which
is good news for pitchers who can demonstrate the right combination of talent
and expertise.
The Artist
Artists, too, display single-minded passion and
enthusiasm about their ideas, but they are less slick and conformist in their
dress and mannerisms, and they tend to be shy or socially awkward. As one
Hollywood producer told me, “The more shy a writer seems, the better you think
the writing is, because you assume they’re living in their internal world.”
Unlike showrunners, artists appear to have little or no knowledge of, or even
interest in, the details of implementation. Moreover, they invert the power
differential by completely commanding the catcher’s imagination. Instead of
engaging the catcher in a duet, they put the audience in thrall to the content.
Artists are particularly adept at conducting what physicists call “thought
experiments,” inviting the audience into imaginary worlds.
One young screenwriter I observed fit the artist type
to perfection. He wore black leather pants and a torn T-shirt, several earrings
in each ear, and a tattoo on his slender arm. His hair was rumpled, his
expression was brooding: Van Gogh meets Tim Burton. He cared little about the
production details for the dark, violent cartoon series he imagined; rather, he
was utterly absorbed by the unfolding story. He opened his pitch like this:
“Picture what happens when a bullet explodes inside someone’s brain. Imagine it
in slow motion. There is the shattering blast, the tidal wave of red, the acrid
smell of gunpowder. That’s the opening scene in this animated sci-fi flick.” He
then proceeded to lead his catchers through an exciting, detailed narrative of
his film, as a master storyteller would. At the end, the executives sat back,
smiling, and told the writer they’d like to go ahead with his idea.
In the business world, artists are similarly
nonconformist. Consider Alan, a product designer at a major packaged-foods
manufacturer. I observed Alan in a meeting with business-development executives
he’d never met. He had come to pitch an idea based on the premise that children
like to play with their food. The proposal was for a cereal with pieces that
interlocked in such a way that children could use them for building things,
Legos style. With his pocket-protected laboratory coat and horn-rimmed glasses,
Alan looked very much the absent-minded professor. As he entered the conference
room where the suited-and-tied executives at his company had assembled, he hung
back, apparently uninterested in the PowerPoint slides or the marketing and
revenue projections of the business-development experts. His appearance and
reticence spoke volumes about him. His type was unmistakable.
When it was Alan’s turn, he dumped four boxes of
prototype cereal onto the mahogany conference table, to the stunned silence of
the executives. Ignoring protocol, he began constructing an elaborate fort, all
the while talking furiously about the qualities of the corn flour that kept the
pieces and the structure together. Finally, he challenged the executives to see
who could build the tallest tower. The executives so enjoyed the demonstration
that they green-lighted Alan’s project.
While artists—who constituted about 40% of the
successful pitchers I observed—are not as polished as show-runners, they are
the most creative of the three types. Unlike showrunners and neophytes, artists
are fairly transparent. It’s harder to fake the part. In other words, they
don’t play to type; they are the type.
Indeed, it is very difficult for someone who is not an artist to pretend to be
one, because genuineness is what makes the artist credible.
The Neophyte
Neophytes are the opposite of showrunners. Instead of
displaying their expertise, they plead ignorance. Neophytes score points for
daring to do the impossible, something catchers see as refreshing. Unencumbered
by tradition or past successes, neophytes present themselves as eager learners.
They consciously exploit the power differential between pitcher and catcher by
asking directly and boldly for help—not in a desperate way, but with the
confidence of a brilliant favorite, a talented student seeking sage advice from
a beloved mentor.
Consider the case of one neophyte pitcher I observed,
a young, ebullient screenwriter who had just returned from his first trip to
Japan. He wanted to develop a show about an American kid (like himself) who
travels to Japan to learn to play taiko drums, and he
brought his drums and sticks into the pitch session. The fellow looked as
though he had walked off the set of Doogie
Howser, M.D. With his infectious smile, he confided to his catchers that he
was not going to pitch them a typical show, “mainly because I’ve never done
one. But I think my inexperience here might be a blessing.”
He showed the catchers a variety of drumming moves,
then asked one person in his audience to help him come up with potential camera
angles—such as looking out from inside the drum or viewing it from
overhead—inquiring how these might play on the screen. When the catcher got
down on his hands and knees to show the neophyte a particularly “cool” camera
angle, the pitch turned into a collaborative teaching session. Ignoring his
lunch appointment, the catcher spent the next half hour offering suggestions
for weaving the story of the young drummer into a series of taiko performances
in which artistic camera angles and imaginative lighting and sound would be
used to mirror the star’s emotions.
Many entrepreneurs are natural neophytes. Lou and
Sophie McDermott, two sisters from Australia, started the Savage Sisters
sportswear line in the late 1990s. Former gymnasts with petite builds and
spunky personalities, they cartwheeled into the clothing business with no
formal training in fashion or finance. Instead, they relied heavily on their
enthusiasm and optimism and a keen curiosity about the fine points of retailing
to get a start in the highly competitive world of teen fashion. On their
shopping outings at local stores, the McDermott sisters studied merchandising
and product placement—all the while asking store owners how they got started,
according to the short documentary film Cutting
Their Own Cloth.
The McDermott sisters took advantage of their
inexperience to learn all they could. They would ask a store owner to give them
a tour of the store, and they would pose dozens of questions: “Why do you buy
this line and not the other one? Why do you put this dress here and not there?
What are your customers like? What do they ask for most?” Instead of being
annoying, the McDermotts were charming, friendly, and fun, and the flattered
retailers enjoyed being asked to share their knowledge. Once they had struck up
a relationship with a retailer, the sisters would offer to bring in samples for
the store to test. Eventually, the McDermotts parlayed what they had learned
into enough knowledge to start their own retail line. By engaging the store
owners as teachers, the McDermotts were able to build a network of expert
mentors who wanted to see the neophytes win. Thus neophytes, who constitute
about 40% of successful pitchers, achieve their gains largely by sheer force of
personality.
If
they rely too heavily on stereotypes, idea buyers might overlook creative
individuals who can truly deliver the goods.
Which of the three types is most likely to succeed?
Overwhelmingly, catchers look for showrunners, though artists and neophytes can
win the day through enchantment and charm. From the catcher’s perspective,
however, showrunners can also be the most dangerous of all pitchers, because
they are the most likely to blind through glitz.
Catchers Beware
When business executives ask me for my insights about
creativity in Hollywood, one of the first questions they put to me is, “Why is
there so much bad television?” After hearing the stories I’ve told here, they
know the answer: Hollywood executives too often let themselves be wooed by
positive stereotypes—particularly that of the showrunner—rather than by the
quality of the ideas. Indeed, individuals who become adept at conveying
impressions of creative potential, while lacking the real thing, may gain entry
into organizations and reach prominence there based on their social influence
and impression-management skills, to the catchers’ detriment.
Real creativity isn’t so easily classified.
Researchers such as Sternberg and Lubart have found that people’s implicit
theories regarding the attributes of creative individuals are off the mark.
Furthermore, studies have identified numerous personal attributes that
facilitate practical creative behavior. For example, cognitive flexibility, a
penchant for diversity, and an orientation toward problem solving are signs of
creativity; it simply isn’t true that creative types can’t be down-to-earth.
Those who buy ideas, then, need to be aware that
relying too heavily on stereotypes can cause them to overlook creative
individuals who can truly deliver the goods. In my interviews with studio
executives and agents, I heard numerous tales of people who had developed
reputations as great pitchers but who had trouble producing usable scripts. The
same thing happens in business. One well-known example occurred in 1985, when
Coca-Cola announced it was changing the Coke formula. Based on pitches from
market researchers who had tested the sweeter, Pepsi-like “new Coke” in
numerous focus groups, the company’s top management decided that the new
formula could effectively compete with Pepsi. The idea was a marketing
disaster, of course. There was a huge backlash, and the company was forced to
reintroduce the old Coke. In a later discussion of the case and the importance
of relying on decision makers who are both good pitchers and industry experts,
Roberto Goizueta, Coca-Cola’s CEO at the time, said to a group of MBAs, in
effect, that there’s nothing so dangerous as a good pitcher with no real
talent.
If a catcher senses that he or she is being swept away
by a positive stereotype match, it’s important to test the pitcher.
Fortunately, assessing the various creative types is not difficult. In a
meeting with a showrunner, for example, the catcher can test the pitcher’s
expertise and probe into past experiences, just as a skilled job interviewer
would, and ask how the pitcher would react to various changes to his or her
idea. As for artists and neophytes, the best way to judge their ability is to
ask them to deliver a finished product. In Hollywood, smart catchers ask artists
and neophytes for finished scripts before hiring them. These two types may be
unable to deliver specifics about costs or implementation, but a prototype can
allow the catcher to judge quality, and it can provide a concrete basis for
further discussion. Finally, it’s important to enlist the help of other people
in vetting pitchers. Another judge or two can help a catcher weigh the
pitcher’s—and the idea’s—pros and cons and help safeguard against hasty
judgments.
One CEO of a Northern California design firm looks
beyond the obvious earmarks of a creative type when hiring a new designer. She
does this by asking not only about successful projects but also about work that
failed and what the designer learned from the failures. That way, she can find
out whether the prospect is capable of absorbing lessons well and rolling with
the punches of an unpredictable work environment. The CEO also asks job
prospects what they collect and read, as well as what inspires them. These
kinds of clues tell her about the applicant’s creative bent and thinking style.
If an interviewee passes these initial tests, the CEO has the prospect work
with the rest of her staff on a mock design project. These diverse interview
tools give her a good indication about the prospect’s ability to combine
creativity and organizational skills, and they help her understand how well the
applicant will fit into the group.• • •
One question for pitchers, of course, might be, “How
do I make a positive impression if I don’t fit into one of the three creative
stereotypes?” If you already have a reputation for delivering on creative
promises, you probably don’t need to disguise yourself as a showrunner, artist,
or neophyte—a résumé full of successes is the best calling card of all. But if
you can’t rely on your reputation, you should at least make an attempt to match
yourself to the type you feel most comfortable with, if only because it’s
necessary to get a foot in the catcher’s door.
Another question might be, “What if I don’t wantthe catcher’s input into the development of my idea?”
This aspect of the pitch is so important that you should make it a priority:
Find a part of your proposal that you are willing to yield on and invite the
catcher to come up with suggestions. In fact, my observations suggest that you
should engage the catcher as soon as possible in the development of the idea.
Once the catcher feels like a creative collaborator, the odds of rejection
diminish.
Ultimately, the pitch will always remain an imperfect
process for communicating creative ideas. But by being aware of stereotyping
processes and the value of collaboration, both pitchers and catchers can
understand the difference between a pitch and a hit.
Kimberly D. Elsbach is associate dean and a professor of organizational
behavior at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis.
No comments:
Post a Comment