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I got an email from a reader last week who was frustrated the media wasn't responding to her pitch. Believe me, it happens to us all the time at Wax so I feel your pain! Often, it's not because the pitch is bad. Usually it's because a) the market is cluttered b) it's hard to differentiate between you and your competitor or c) you're pitching too "big" of a publication or show to start. I have to admit that sometimes it's because it's
just not a very compelling pitch. In this post I'm going to give you a short homework assignment to uncover the REAL story behind your business...the one the media might be looking for.
Too often, people try to pitch the features of their product to the media. This only works if your product is one of a kind (think pet rock). You may think no one else makes something quite like yours, but in the eyes of a jaded editor, there are tons of products just like yours. I was pitching a new fitness DVD a few years ago and the editor at Health magazine told me she'd received 400 new fitness DVD's..just that month! So you can't write a pitch that focuses on the greatness of your product. You have to pitch the story behind YOU, behind the product itself, or how the product relates to current events.
Here are some great examples of pitches that sold tons, but focuses on the story not the product:
A program on American Public Media’s Marketplace on Saturday morning caught my attention as APM’s Heidi Moore presented the pros and cons of using the GDP and consumerism as a means of measuring how “well” we’re doing. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a conundrum that as we try to reuse as much as we can (right now to the current obsession with vintage clothing) we’re still measuring ourselves on how much we’re consuming. It’s the same when I hear that unemployment is high, but the number of startups is rapidly increasing. Does anyone not see the correlations between these things? I can’t tell you how many of my friends have started their businesses while on unemployment. (Frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that and I’m happy to pay taxes to fund my friends’ and others’ dreams.)
I don’t agree with a lot of what happens in the UK but I was intrigued by the new Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index. It’s an index of how well UK residents are doing in terms of their health and well-being. The reporter went on to talk about “why don’t we have one here” and so I looked it up. We’ve had a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in the US since 2008. (Shame on you, Heidi Moore that was super easy to find.)
Basically, here’s what it does:
