Loading ...The Opinion Addiction
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Multiple opinions are often worth the same as a 100% share in nothing
There’s an old joke I used to hear as a kid that went something like this. Put three Jews in a room and you’ll wind up with four opinions. Today, that joke sounds a tad anti-semitic and dated. The three people in the room don’t have to be Jews and would now lead to fourteen opinions.
Human beings are creatures of opinion. We love to give them and we love to receive them, with the hidden proviso that the opinion be what we want to hear. How else to explain people’s addictions to visiting psychics? We pay the psychic money so that the psychic can, ideally, tell us exactly what we want to be told. If it were the norm to be told we had a year to live, we were going to get fired, our spouse was cheating on us, I doubt people would be in a rush to hear about their futures.
Back when I lived in California and was reading lots of screenplay books and attending screenplay seminars, I remember one pundit’s advice. He said that after you finished your screenplay, you should give it to ten people you trusted and get their opinions. If the same suggestions kept coming up, then there was probably something to them. And when three of the ten thought your screenplay well polished, only then were you ready to submit to the professionals. This guru must’ve changed his mind about that in the intervening decade. I now see up on his own web site that you can submit your screenplay directly to him, and he’ll evaluate it – for USD 2,500. Maybe he is onto something. Depending on the subject opined upon, one opinion by a true expert is easily worth more than the opinions of ten laymen. I still don’t think it’s worth USD 2,500 for this guy’s opinion, but I’ll delve into that issue a little bit later.
There’s a difference between obtaining market research and getting opinions that count. When gathering market research about a new product or service, it can pay to speak to plenty of potential customers in the target market in order to find out what features might be desired, omitted, or improved. But this consensus opinion approach doesn’t always work. It’s become common in the last decade and a half for movie producers to conduct screenings of their films before release to see how audiences will react. Some films are shot with multiple endings, and the ending which gets the best response in focus groups is the one used in the finalprint. But the ending people think they want isn’t always the most appropriate ending for the story or best for the film as a whole. Had J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, conducted market research in advance in order to decide what events to include in the later novels, I think we’d all agree that the final product would’ve been inferior.
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