At the beginning of the American Century most citizens believed that social mobility was possible if a person was bold and audacious enough to seek it.
In a professional baseball game a pitcher’s arm may only last 50 or 60 pitches. But playing the game of American life may require that we never stop. To each other we pitch for charities, business ideas, book proposals, movies, advertising campaigns and political contributions. Most of us know the rules. Make the best case you can in a compact time period you are given. And never get caught throwing curve balls.
One kind of pitch is the fundraiser. It’s perhaps a function of our times that we are flooded with invitations to attend events designed to raise money for causes that are worthy, but starved for support. A recent fundraiser at a posh country club was raising funds for a non-profit organization that provides basic housing and life skills for the developmentally disabled. Amidst the brie and smoked salmon a room of well-healed people joined an auction to bid on weekend getaways and meals at 4-star restaurants, with all of the money going to the cause. Similarly, local newspapers regularly feature heartrending attempts to crowd-source the costs of an essential medical treatment that a community member cannot otherwise receive. Only in America do we seem to miss the irony of ubiquitous pitches made by neighbors to find dollars to fund services that other advanced societies provide to all.
A friend in London notes that she mostly encounters sidewalk pitches for non-profit organizations. But the appeals are usually to benefit distant populations suffering from famine or other scourges. The goal is to make a quick plea for a worthy cause, with a follow-up request asking the listener to immediately text the money to the needy group. Another friend in Denver confirms a similar pattern, but for more local charities. She cautions that a walk up busy 16th Street at the center of downtown is done more easily if pretending to talk on a phone. That apparently keeps those who are ready to pounce at bay.
We have also institutionalized pitches. Candidates meet with potential donors mostly in private to make the case that they alone can rescue the nation. Presidential politics has now become a fully commercialized enterprise. PBS television stations have similarly turned their once-gentle requests for funds into sometimes gaudy infomercial extravaganzas. Television has even enshrined the act of making a pitch in shows like CNBC’s Shark Tank, where the proposals of budding entrepreneurs function as a kind of entertainment. We get to see how potential investors react to a “hard-sell” made by a dreamer claiming to have invented the next big thing.
The man “on the make” is an American type, enshrined in such social science classics as Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans (Vintage, 1973) and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Yale, 1961). As members of a younger and still unformed society our forbearers knew that social mobility was possible if a person was bold and audacious enough to seek it. This kind of up-by-your-bootstraps optimism marked the dominant style of early MGM films such as Babes in Arms (1939), and has been lovingly caricatured in the Coen Brother’s Hudsucker Proxy (1994). The brashness of American hype is a fantasy about ourselves that we still celebrate.
What makes a good pitch for a new product or service? Circumstances require different approaches, but as a general rule the presenter can usually rely on a few elemental guidelines.
1. Be brief and to the point. Explain the concept quickly. Then move on to the comparative advantages that make the new idea superior to competing products or services.
2. Explain the unmet need that is satisfied with the new product.
3. Put the audience in the picture. How might they or a family member use the service?
4. Sell your experience and know-how as part of the deal. It's true of investors that they want the expertise of the pitch-maker as much as they want the product or service.
No business school today could be without courses that require sales and marketing students to storm their classes with a blizzard of hypothetical opportunities too good to pass up. That is one of many possible reminders of why a cultural milestone like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) remains not just a sad family saga, but a quintessential American tragedy.
Even very good arguments describing musicians who are deprived of compensation usually have no impact on downloaders.
Communication often involves thinking strategically to find the right appeals that will produce compliance in a target audience. Searching for ways to induce others to accept the kinds of choices we endorse is always a challenge. And while it usually makes sense to focus on what works—strategies that show some success in getting agreement—I am struck with how difficult it is to produce one kind of change: convincing individuals that a favored leisure activity is a bad ethical choice. It almost never works.
There are no shortages of relevant cases where we have all have been on the sending or receiving end of these appeals: criticizing attendance at sporting events that can result in serious injuries to the participants (boxing, football), decrying a life-style choice that wastes resources (owning a mile-to-the-gallon cigarette boat or SUV), attending performances that include individuals charged with making bad choices (avoiding films by Woody Allen), using products that come with significant health risks (smoking, racing motorcycles), and so on. We all struggle with the apparent hypocrisy of violating our own values in the pursuit of the things we enjoy.
One especially good case study is the plea from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and any number of musicians to not download “pirated” music. The request is to instead purchase “legal” singles and albums from record companies or online retailers, who will then distribute royalties to songwriters and musicians. The cause seems just, even though the industry can be its own worst enemy, as in attempts by Warner Music to go after restaurants and public venues where someone might sing “Happy Birthday to you,” a song they erroneously claimed to own.
Piracy is no longer a new problem. But one can look at the state of the music industry today and conclude that the digital revolution has been cruel to musicians. Stephen Witt’s recent book, How Music Got Free (Viking, 2015) is just the latest account of the unraveling of the record business, mostly at the hands of ordinary listeners who can now copy music files without payment. Witt reports that there was only one platinum album (1 million units shipped) in 2014. The singer was Taylor Swift, and–as television’s ET reports– even she’s not happy.
We simply don’t buy as much recorded music any more. We rent it, sometimes legally from online services, and often borrow it from each other, bypassing a legitimate path for distributing royalties. Fewer albums and singles are sold today because a digital copy of any one can function as a “master” available to make many more.
I’m always impressed with how little impact solid arguments about musicians deprived of compensation actually have on listeners, which means most of us. We simply resist linking our behavior to the theft or “piracy” of someone’s creative work. It’s not that we have to worry about whether Ms. Swift will be able to pay the light bill. It’s that musicians in virtually every musical category have been cut off from revenue streams that could support them.
And so a simple quid pro quo can be made: To support the musicians you like, buy their music. But images of talented modern musicians living as paupers doesn’t motivate in the ways one might expect. Adding in the argument that downloading is “theft” of their intellectual property hardly results in the kind of cognitive dissonance a persuader might expect.
Even students who are also budding musicians don’t seem to take the bait. Perhaps they should. As RIAA spokesman Cary Sherman noted in a 2012 speech, the Bureau of labor statistics estimates there is a 41% drop since 1999 in people who identify themselves as musicians. That corresponds to a continuing decline in the sale of recorded music of all sorts. Even though more albums are being released, most (80%) sell less than 100 copies.
At several levels it’s obvious why we do not heed requests to change a behavior we enjoy. Our leisure passions are linked to our personal identity. To give them up is to face the unwelcome thought of becoming at least a slightly different person. Then, too, the immediate rewards of our passion are much more tangible than compliance with a behavioral ideal. It’s probably only a few academics and some musicians who like to intellectualize potential hypocrisies.
In addition, we can generate perfect rationalizations that will take us off the hook. We look for cases that will confirm a prefered view that no harm is done. Using this kind of process of “motivated reasoning,” we focus on the single instance that minimizes the power of arguments for change. Hence: “Taylor Swift will never miss the puny royalties she would get from a legal download,” or “I paid too much to hear Paul McCartney last year,” or “I live by the principle that the internet ‘wants to be free.'” And so we find ways to not notice the lie that separates our best instincts from our actions.
