Pitch day. You’ve done your due diligence. You know your potential client well and have formulated a comprehensive pitch – one that addresses the many reasons why your agency should win the client’s business.
The presentation goes well; you feel quietly confident. Then you receive the call: “They’ve decided to go in a different direction.”
Losing a pitch can sting, even to the most seasoned partner, and especially when you feel you were the right person for the job. There are, of course, many reasons why a business might choose to give their account to one agency over the other. Some of these – budget constraints and how well the winning team made their case – lie outside of your control.
Now is the time for constructive introspection. What could you have done differently? How could you have changed the delivery of your message to make sure it resonated with the client?
One way to transform the way you make your case (and your intended target hears it) is to remember that less is often more. Framed another way, what matters more than the quantity of information in your pitch is its quality.
In the United States, direct-to-consumer drug advertisements, by law, must list all side effects of the drug. This means that in a television commercial advertising a particular pharmaceutical product, audiences may be told about a myriad of side effects ranging from the significant to the relatively minor. If you’ve ever watched TV in the US, chances are you are all too familiar with these ads.
My colleague Hemant Kakkar and I investigated the unintended consequences of sharing this information in drug advertisements and found that the inclusion of relatively minor side-effects, such a tiredness, actually led audiences to downplay the significance of the more serious side effects, such as risk of stroke.
What is at play is a recognised cognitive bias known as the ‘dilution effect’. It’s one of the many biases that plague humans’ ability to make sound decisions.
Here is how it works: when making a judgement – it could be about which brand of juice to buy or which medication to choose – individuals weigh up a series of factors; some of these arguments or factors are highly salient, others are less so.
When making an argument or attempting to prove a point, it can be tempting to include as much information as possible. You might choose to start with your most convincing argument, and supplement it with some weaker points to add a bit more flesh to the bone. This approach is based on the assumption that your argument is helped by fully outlining the case in your favour. In reality, the addition of weaker arguments dilutes the strength of the most powerful argument in the mind of the listener.
Rather than adding to your overall point, the additional information can actually undermine the ‘punch’ of your strongest argument. You are better off making your point using your very best arguments and leaving it at that.
In the case of US drug advertisements, Dr. Kakkar and I found that participants in our studies who viewed an advertisement listing all of a particular drug’s side effects, judged the severity of that drug’s side-effects to be less severe than when the same advertisement was shown without the mention of the more minor side effects. The unfortunate result is that, by supplying information about every possible risk, consumers are more likely to disregard the potentially most serious risk factors.
Of course, if you are a pharmaceutical brand trying to downplay the seriousness of a product’s side effects, the dilution effect can be helpful. When making a pitch to win a digital transformation project, listing a shopping list of your strengths hurts you.
So what should you do to avoid the pitfalls of the dilution effect when making your case to a potential client?
Identify your main selling points, and leave the others to the side lines. Stick to your strongest arguments in your pitch, keeping in mind that you may actually only need one or two points to make your argument. If you were only able to make a 30-second pitch, what would you want the client to know in that time?
Avoid adding additional, but ultimately insignificant, pieces of information to your pitch that may detract from the power and impact of your main selling argument. It is understandable that when wanting to put your agency’s best foot forward, you want to ensure that the client leaves the meeting with a comprehensive understanding of the many benefits they will enjoy by awarding you the account. But bear in mind that you risk undermining your strongest point and key message by supplementing it with less salient information.
Remember this advice when formulating your pitch and you will avoid a potentially major source of self-sabotage. And, once you’ve won the account and the real work begins, keep the dilution effect in mind.
After all, if listing additional information in pharmaceutical advertisements can reduce the perceived severity of a product’s side-effects, the opposite effect can be achieved through your advertising copy. Make your language impactful and to-the-point, and avoid the small print if you want your marketing message to resonate as powerfully as possible.
