For Immediate Release
September 5, 2008
Media contact:
Amery Calvelli
(503) 331 6247
amery@pushLLC.com
Return to article listThe anti-pitch: a brief explanation
Let’s say you decide to try out a bunch of salons in search of the right one for your haircut account. You go to a different stylist every few weeks and run them through their paces—but you don’t want to make it too easy by letting them know in advance what you want (you don’t exactly know, anyway). You just tell them, “Knock me out!” But they get all huffy when you explain that you’re not paying, just sampling, and now your hair looks like the dog groomer won the job, and the salon receptionists all hang up on you.
Of course, at the growth rate of hair follicles, it would take two years to cycle through the competition. The point is that the practice of insisting on free samples—a.k.a. pitches—from design firms competing for your business yields questionable results and uneasy relationships.
It Takes Two
Good design is like call-and-response, salsa dancing, badminton, and many another two-way endeavor that’s only worth doing when both sides put their heart into it: it works best when it’s mutual. If you want to engage a creative firm to provide good design that chimes with you, your clients, your project, and your goals, we better get to know each other. Let’s start off this healthy give-and-take with some mutual respect.
It’s not mutual when the client gives three or four agencies a few vague guidelines, judges them on the basis of their best-guess, shot-in-the-dark concepts, and then picks through the pile of ideas left on the table.
Nevertheless, the client awarding the account may think, “Well, tough luck for the design agency—pitching is an occupational hazard.” So forget the woes and whines on the agency side, and consider, instead, the client’s self-interest:
You need design work that reflects the real you:
You’re looking for a creative agency, not the psychic network. An agency needs to understand your firm, your project, and your goals before they can create work that really resonates with your brand. Don’t settle for less—and if you’re choosing a concept that was rushed together without adequate input, you’re settling for far less.
You want an orderly process for a rational project:
Visual design is never Step One of a project—it should follow a diligent course of interviews, on-site visits, fact-finding, and creative cogitation. Besides, if an agency puts a lot of time and effort into a pitch concept, they may resent switching over to the better concept that arises once they know what they’re doing (and resentment’s no good for any project).
You want to get moving—so skip the window-shopping:
Often, the pitch cycle is seen as a way to bring an amorphous need into better focus; you don’t really know what you want, but you’ll figure it out in the process. Isn’t it much more effective—and faster—to simply cut the preliminaries, and work collaboratively with an agency to define and delineate your project?
You want a close look at the design firm you’re hiring:
You’ll learn a lot more from an agency’s portfolio, client list, references, and a good old-fashioned interview than you’d learn from a one-off circus act.
You want a long-term, evolving relationship with a design firm, not a series of trysts gone wrong:
We’ll skip further courtship-and-marriage metaphors and just say: you don’t want to do this over and over again, do you?
You get what you pay for:
That maxim should be self-evident—but apparently is not.
Our San Francisco design agency, 300FeetOut, is far from the only shop to decide that competitive pitching is unsatisfactory for the client, demeaning for the agency, and a rocky kick-off to a beautiful relationship. As the slyly subversive (yet best-selling) proclamation on better business marketing, Cluetrain Manifesto, says: “Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone” (thesis #16 from the Cluetrain Manifesto).
Good design takes conversation, not smoke and mirrors. Let’s talk!