We’ve all come across them, the individuals or companies who don’t follow the herd, who aren’t thinking what you’re thinking, who are always heading in another direction. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether they have a serious point to make, and one that’s worth paying attention to, or are just doing it for effect.
Regardless of how you feel about them, there’s no denying they tend to think ‘differently’ from everyone else. And that can make them attractive to the media. Let’s face it, we all suffer from story fatigue and start to lose interest when everyone in the media runs the same story. It’s at that point editors usually ask: ‘Can’t we get a new angle on this?’
Enter the challengers, disrupters and contrarians. If you’re looking for someone to confront current thinking and rattle the status quo cage who better to talk to?
I’ve yet to meet a journalist who liked having their ‘knowledge’ questioned. Nor do they enjoy being told ‘You’ve missed the whole point of the story.’ It makes them wonder if they’ve overlooked another previously hidden narrative.
No journalist wants to admit they’ve been barking up the wrong tree. And by challenging a previously accepted storyline the challengers, disrupters and contrarians make the press think again.
Of course, if you are planning to rock the media’s boat you’d better have something solid to back-up your challenge—like an independent survey, research data, official stats, or customer experiences. In short, not ‘spin’.
Moreover, when it comes to engaging with the press the best disrupters, challengers and contrarians aren’t the ‘shouty’ ones—they’re the ones who make genuinely-interesting ‘left field’ points, calmly and with authority, and with a convincing and above-all-else believable narrative.
So can you make a journalist think twice? It’s not unusual for them to approach an interview with a preconceived idea of what the story is all about, and where it sits. They may even have the headline already written in their heads… But is that where the story really is from your perspective? Have they actually got it right? And can you show them where they’ve missed the point—and prove it? If so, you’re more likely to get them to reconsider their position and report yours.
Just remember in your desire to provide that alternative narrative it’s easy to forget the first rule of contrarianism. Namely, if you’re going to tell a journalist ‘That’s not the world as we see it’ you’d better convince them you not only know more than they do but have facts that prove it. If you can do that then you could generate fresh media coverage for yourself when everyone else thought the story was yesterday’s news…