Happy Friday, everyone!
For this week's poll question, we decided to focus on an issue raised by branding guru Blaine Parker in this week's edition of HOT SHOTS*. Blaine contends that unlike eggs, milk, cheese, and RVs, radio has no brand. Click here to read his argument in its entirety. Then we'd like to hear your answers to these questions that Blaine posed:
Why is radio so incapable of branding itself? What should radio's brand be? And if your station is successful, how has it risen above the abysmal state of the industry brand as a whole?
Looking forward to reading your replies! (And thank you for broaching this topic, Blaine!)
*To subscribe to HOT SHOTS, Blaine's weekly missive -- always an entertaining and informative read -- click here.
Agree with part of what Blaine said. Big corps, accountants and lawyers do not lead to creativity. There all there to play it safe.
I'm not sure that "radio" has to have a brand. Do billboards? TV?
I think individual stations need to be branded. Branding a "cluster" is ridiculous. No one cares about the cluster. They only care about their station.
Unfortunately, marketing companies are typically the worst at marketing themselves.
Maybe I'm not understanding the question, but it would seem ridiculous to me to try and brand radio as a whole. That's like branding cell phones, television, or cars. Each station is it''s own brand and each cell phone company, television or car maker has iit's own uniqueness and therefore it's own brand. Can you imagine a car ad that said, "Get a car and you can go wherever you want." The reason they pushed eggs, milk, and cheese as products was because many producers got behind that one unique product, ignored their own company brand in order to push said product across a vast area. RV ads came out in the infancy of RV production to push folks to buy an RV. But radio as a whole, should not have a brand. Our new/talk station is not cheese. Its cheddar. Our hot AC is not an egg, but a brown egg. And our classic hits station is not milk, but rather 2% milk. And since branding happens through audio more than anything, if you want to brand a radio station, you would have to do it through another type of audio delivery system like TV, Youtube, or an online music service, A very tough row to hoe.
To be clear, I should have said above that, if you want to brand your radio station "to someone other than your present listeners."
In his book BILLION-DOLLAR BRANDING, Blaine proposes this simple definition of branding: Brand is the one way you want consumers to feel about your business.
Remember this campaign from several years back? According to the archived website's sponsors (and Radio's official cheerleaders), the Radio Advertising Bureau and the National Association of Broadcasters, "The campaign to remind listeners what they love most about free, local radio was incredibly successful."
Unfortunately, they didn't elaborate on how this success was defined or measured.
Radio as a "brand" ...of what? Entertainment? Information? Technology?
And as distinct from what other brands? Television? The Internet? The Next New Thing?
Is Radio seriously disadvantaged on account of its not having a well-defined brand?
Some of Radio's most passionate evangelists are right here in this community, veterans of four and five decades' experience as well as enthusiastic young people who are just entering the business. My guess is that they're all involved, consciously or unconsciously, in the branding of their own stations - working to establish in the hearts of their listeners and advertisers a preference for them.
As Jack and David have both indicated, Radio is easier to relate to as a category, rather than a brand. One doesn't think of the Internet as a brand (perhaps that will change when Blaine gets to the right people) - but there are plenty of brands that come to mind when I think "Internet." Amazon. eBay. Wikipedia. Facebook. Google. You Tube. All are top-of-mind.
Earlier today I wondered whether consumers consider Major League Baseball to be a brand. After all, they have a logo. (So do the NBA, the NHL, and the NFL.) They have a website. (Never been there until just now, when I Googled them.)
Does it matter, really?
The action for MLB (or any of the other national sports organizations) is really at the team level. Each team is a distinctive brand, stirring the hearts and minds of its legions of fans.
Individual radio stations are brands, too. So are local morning shows, syndicated talk shows, and weekend special interest shows. The strength of each of these brands, sub-brands of Radio, depends upon the quality of their marketing and execution.
A prominent local eye doctor recently called our morning news with Bill and Evan, "the best morning show in America." He said so, right on Facebook, for all the world to see. As far as he's concerned, it's absolutely true. Even though you've never heard of Bill and Evan until just now.
Whether or not we'll ever agree on an overall Radio brand, local branding is important.
Sorry but I disagree with Blaine. About the part that radio needs a brand.
This 1st part pertains to how radio is perceived by the public:
I do agree that there have been some terrible branding efforts by individual stations or owners, but to try and brand all radio under one brand is very similar to the corporate efforts to create homogeneity across the board with formats that were centralized from one studio to dozens, or hundreds of stations and markets.
Each station needs a brand that reflects who they are in the community they serve. I don't think we are at the point that people do not know what a radio station is. With 90% of the population listening every week, even if the number of teens listening weekly is down to 70%, it's not a branding problem. It's a relevancy problem. You have to give people a reason to listen to what you offer. Local information and local content must be included no matter what the music or other programming you offer.
Now what about a brand, no make that a positioning statement, for our advertisers?
Something I picked up over 25 years ago that I still say today, "Radio is Word of Mouth Advertising, with a Bigger Mouth". That usually hits home with most of the business owners I talk with,
I use something similar. "Radio is word of mouth on steroids" or "we have the biggest mouth in town".
I LOVE using the word of mouth analogy. Many business people will say that their best advertising is word of mouth. I say that I agree with that but what's your message this week and who is controlling it?
I tell clients I'm not concerned if people come into their business and say they heard an ad on the radio. I'm much more interested in creating positive word of mouth among the 200 people that every person knows or their circle of influence.
Jack, my friend Phil Bernstein used to tell clients and prospects that he was in the "ear rental" business, emphasizing the destination rather than the source. Always a good idea to emphasize the indispensable role of speech in human communication (print being an imitation of speech).
In the case of branding an industry, it would indeed seem a tough row to hoe. Good cheese comes from happy cows and happy cows come from California. Got Milk? Go RV'ing. The incredible edible egg. It would seem to be ridiculous to brand the mere ideas of California cheese, milk, RVs and eggs--but they've all four done it successfully. And this in spite of each industry having countless brands. Why shouldn't the radio industry be able to do it? To some degree, it's been tried before--and has been delivered to audiences only via radio, which is bordering on pointless. If a business doesn't decide exactly what its brand is, make it clear and deliver a distinctive and resonant message, people at large get to decide what the brand is. And the brand for radio stinks. Those of us inside it think radio's great. Outside radio, it's a whole different story. No reason why the radio industry shouldn't be able to develop a resonant brand campaign that drives home the joy of radio. Not that I have an opinion on this, of course...
You're talking about individual branding efforts. But what about a concerted effort by the industry (which has an industry organization just like many others) to give people a reason to believe the mere idea of radio is relevant? To many, radio simply isn't relevant. You say your "word-of-mouth" idea "usually hits home with most of the business owners I talk with." Excellent. It's a good line. But before you got to them, they already knew "got milk." They already knew about happy cows and California cheese. What did they think about radio before you told them anything? That it's in their car and has buttons? You're one man saying one relevant thing. Why isn't the industry saying something like that one relevant thing all over the country? I just think it's a shame that we have legions of talented radio folks across the country trying to sell the idea of radio, and there's no national effort to support it. And, as I said to Mr. Neely above, it's not like I have an opinion on this...
Thanks for lighting the fuse on this one, Rod. Just as a thought on this, I once created a campaign for the Southern California Broadcasters Association. It was called, "Radio Means Business." It was a series of spots about how much business can be generated through radio advertising. As far as I can tell, almost nobody ever actually ran the spots, which were made available free of charge--but still required the stations to give up 30- and 60-second slots to them. And for material they didn't create that didn't promote their own sales departments. What would have made more sense (besides the SCBA actually buying air time) is advertising in print media, internet, billboards, even direct mail. It was an effort to brand the idea not of radio, but of radio advertising, and it really needed to run someplace besides on radio. <sigh>
Blaine, did you by any chance save those "Radio Means Business" spots?
I'd love to hear them - and to share them in our Pro-Radio Commercials repository.
I don't know, Rod. It's somewhere on a long filed hard drive. i just went to the SCBA's website. The page is still there, but the links don't link to anything. I'd have to dig.
Thought you all might like to see Blaine's follow-up article on this topic (and just a reminder, you can read his original piece here):
|
Our radio station in Stephenville Texas, KWBY is locally owned and operated by myself and my husband and has only been in business for a little over a year. In a town of a little over 17,000 people and a competitor radio station in town, we knew we had to brand ourselves and make ourselves stand out from the other station. Before we started, we asked around town what people wanted to hear music wise...we got two things: Classic Rock and "Texas/Red Dirt" - We play both. We came up with KWBY and dubbed ourselves "Cowboy Capital. Cowboy Radio" since Stephenville is the "Cowboy Capital of The World" and Cowboys/Rodeos don't play one solid genre. We play what our listeners want to hear and in this part of Texas, between the Ft. Worth Stockyards and Austin, Tx where independent music is key, they DO NOT want to hear "Bro Country" or Main Stream Nashville music and we use that to our advantage with "No Bro Country" promos... promos that say "them...and have Luke Bryan playing .... Us and have AC/DC .... Them followed by Taylor Swift .... Us followed by Randy Rogers, etc" We even had a listener write a "No Bro Country" song that we us as a jingle. It has gone over better than we expected and our listeners are busting out of the walls for just one year in business. Our logo is custom to us with barbed wire and the call letters stand out better anything else and people are recognizing it. We say "Cowboy Capital. Cowboy Radio." ALL the time and we've received many videos of little kids and families saying our slogan...without asking for them
We were the "New" station in town and we had to get the listener's attention ... we became the "rebels" going against every station that had ever been in this town and doing our own thing and promoting it as such and luckily, it has worked. We are also VERY involved in our community and attend as many events as physically possible and do tons of self-promotion. I completely believe in finding "YOU AS A STATION" and branding that. We actually were nominated for two awards at the Texas Regional Radio Awards Show in March and asked to come and speak about how we branded our station in less than a year.
If we do nothing to promote and brand ourselves as radio stations, how can we ask potential advertisers to trust us to do it for them?
-Sara
KWBY 107.9 & 98.5
Stephenville, Tx
Hey, Sara--
Good stuff. I applaud the effort.
The point I'm making is about the brand of the radio industry as a whole. Why isn't there a national branding effort on behalf of radio to sell the idea of its continued relevance? Where's our "Got Milk?" And why does the general brand of radio suck?
All that said, you raise an interesting question: how can we ask potential advertisers to trust radio stations to brand them if radio stations can't brand themselves?
I propose that the branding efforts stations make on their own behalf is typically far better than the effort they make on behalf of their clients.
But then, is branding a client the station's job?
Shouldn't a client come to the station with an idea of what their brand is? And shouldn't the station's job merely be to deliver that brand via radio?
In a perfect world, yes.
But that often isn't the case.
And most stations are woefully ill prepared to help the client in that regard.
My guess, based on your delightful screed, is that your station is an exception.
I've actually done a teleseminar with Dan O'.Day called "Branding Backwards."
Since my background is radio, and our agency specializes in branding for small businesses, we have a distinct opinion on this issue, to wit: a station should always be prepared to create the brand for a client.
It is possible to brand an unbranded client and deliver that brand over the air. I did it for years. A client should come with a brand. It shouldn't be the job of the station to define the brand. But it can be done. And a station can deliver it.
Thanks for your delightfully incredulous reply. Go Cowboy.
Cheers,
Blaine
