One of my favorite movies lately is The Big Short. If you haven’t seen it, it is about a few underdogs in the financial industry who “shorted” the real estate industry, meaning that they bet it would fail, as opposed to most investors who bet that an industry or stock will succeed. The bet is unconventional, risky, and a little rebellious. I had to figure out how to apply the idea of “shorting” into my own line of work.
As a PR person, it is an odd exercise. We are, by the nature of our work, intended to be the biggest cheerleaders for those we represent. Why would we ask or introduce the idea of our clients or companies failing? However, I found this would frequently uncover the blind spots in my pitches or content, and made me stronger in my craft.
Betting Against Yourself
Often times, I see story ideas, and while they are interesting and compelling, they lack a critical piece of information that makes the content relevant to the audience: “What happens if you fail?”
Spoiler alert: you will get some odd looks when you ask this question. People hate this question. But it is one of the most critical questions that I ask in content sessions since it gets to the heart of what is at stake. It is the stakes and the threat of failure that create an emotional investment from your audience, and is one of the strongest persuasive tools in communications. It takes asking the tough questions in order to get to the content that will truly make your content interesting, and ultimately, relevant to your target audience.
Using The Risk of Failure to Create a Big Idea
During my time at Duarte (a storytelling agency that taught me so much about content - thanks Nancy!), one of the biggest lessons I learned was how to create a big idea, which is the one main message you want your audience to remember.
In her book Resonate, Duarte does a great job outlining the key components of a big idea to drive persuasive communications:
It must contain your unique perspective. This is different than a high-level topic like “minimally invasive surgical procedures,” and instead needs a point of view. For example, “New tools allow us to advance minimally invasive surgical procedures.”
It must communicate what’s at stake. This is where shorting your pitch comes into play. This gives your audience a reason to care enough to adopt your perspective. If your audience understands what is at stake by taking or not taking action, then they understand why their action is important. This step is critical, as it can turn a pitch from “ announcing a new tool that helps minimally invasive surgery” to “This medical device allows surgeons to perform less invasive procedures with increased accuracy, thus lowering the recovery time for patients and overall costs for hospitals.”
It must be stated as a complete sentence. Simple enough, but your idea should include a noun and a verb, indicating who should take action, and what that action should be. It’s hard to persuade people toward a behavior if you are not directly specifying what you want them to do. Make it easy on your audience. For example, “hospital administrators must continue to invest in new medical devices like ours to perform minimally invasive procedures to lower the recovery time for patients and their overall costs.”
It should amplify an emotion. People are motivated to action by two things: pleasure or pain. It is up to you to decide whether your audience will respond better to an increased likelihood of pleasure if they take action, or to an increased likelihood of pain if they reject the idea. It can show up like this: “If hospitals don’t continue to invest in new medical devices like ours for minimally invasive procedures, your patients will have longer recovery times, resulting in higher overall costs for the hospital and making your hospital less profitable than competing hospitals.”
Once you have your big idea, you have a strong story angle that you can flesh out for media pitches, blog posts, presentations, or any other channel for your persuasive communications. By starting with understanding the stakes of the pitch and the action you are persuading your target audience to, you can create a stronger story angle and become an overall more effective communicator.
How do you “short” your pitches?
