Is Country Radio Too Dependent On Music?

NuVooDoo's strategic researchers have been sharing their radio format national perceptual trending on their blog for several years.  Recently, they've been probing the aspects of programming which "delight" the typical format listener.

If you ask what it was that surprised them other than a song, the answers tend to be contest prizes and funny morning show bits.  Well-designed contests hit the mark, as does genuinely humorous comedy.  While listeners rarely cite being pleasantly surprised by station imaging, we’re certain that there are instances of that among the 37% overall who were surprised in a good way by something other than a song in the past week.
   -- Leigh Jacobs

Pop CHR ranks #1 in its ability to please the audience with music and country comes in a close second in that measurement.

However, when they dug into the most pleasing non-music content, country radio ranks next to last when compared to eight other music formats.

Even worse, country's most pleasing non-music surprises come about once a month, compared to the other format listeners who get their surprises daily or at least weekly when compared to our P-1 listeners.

If the passion for country's music softens, as it historically always has about once a decade for every music style, almost all other formats are better positioned in the minds of their core in contest prizes, funny morning show bits and other program elements besides music images.

There's never a better time to measure your station-specific performance in driving usage and loyalty with non-music content than right now.

Maintaining Listener Loyalty

1. Be consistent.  Unfamiliarity is almost always a negative.  Surround it with the familiar, so it appears as a pleasant surprise, an expected part of the overall presentation.
2. Be the soundtrack of your listener’s life.
3. It’s a 140 character, 17 second, society.  Be brief.  Respect the listener’s time.
4. Be a companion and friend, never an announcer.  Avoid phrase patterns and verbal crutches.
5. Cluster music into long sets.  Control commercial content. 
6. Hopefully, you can play fewer commercials than your direct competition.  If not, your only winning option is longer stopsets and fewer of them, placed equally on both sides of quarter hours, equidistant from each other in the hour if you’re being measured by Nielsen PPM methodology.  If it’s BBM PPM, the station with the strongest content and the least minutes of potential tune outs wins.  If it’s diaries that make up your ratings, place commercial breaks so that you hold your listener for 35 minutes, equalling four “quarter hours.”  If it’s a phone survey, top of kindness wins.  Use telephone in your contesting and have the biggest, best prizes and promotions.
7. Two five unit breaks per hour is ideal.
8. Count units, not minutes.  From the listener’s point of view, intros, outros, :30s, :60s, and even “mentions” are all commercials.
9. Play only hits.  Never add a song until you believe it’s going to be a hit.
10. Play “clutter busters” once every quarter with your staff.  Make a list of the least popular bits, benchmarks and programs you air from the talent’s perspective and then test them with listeners in an online survey or focus groups.  Drop unpopular ones.
11. Promote, but never HYPE.  Do what you say and offer proof.

Listing these things is easy.  DOING them is hard.  Odds are, your owner or manager will expect you to win loyalty while stinting on some of them.

That's why we believe you need a consultant.  You can sometimes win while cutting a few of these corners, but if you need to constantly and predictably do so.

There's only one way to do that.

To constantly dominate a market position, be uncompromising when it comes to all listener loyalty drivers.

Success

Now that PPM has proven the average radio station’s highest usage daypart is afternoon, it’s not possible to simply judge a morning and midday personality by their daypart's ratings alone.

• Does morning drive attract enough early morning cume recycle their audience into midday and afternoon?  (folks tuning to radio at home before 7 am, listen several hours per day more than the average person - who now starts their day at home with television and only turns to radio when they get in the car, so those very early radio at home listeners help the station all day)
• Does your morning audience grow after 8 am, as listeners arrive at work?  (many do not, as a station's cume switches into at work station mode)
• Does the midday talent take whatever cume given to them in their first quarter hour and avoid dips in their quarter hour by quarter hour and day by day audiences (that requires an understanding of the best places to put the stickest content)?

A morning show and midday host is successful when they not just beat their competitors head to head, but when a large percentage of the cume audience is actually returned to the station for the next day part.

Evenings and overnights must do the same thing for the next morning show's audience.

Listener retention is about both eliminating irritants and entertaining content, acting like a user magnet in every minute.

That is how we must attack our success.

5 Ways To Build Loyalty To Any Radio Show

From old pal Cliff Dumas who doesn't call himself a "talent coach," but prefers "talent mentor:"

1.    Every break in PPM stands alone, so each break must be a positive, fun and entertaining experience for the listener .
2.    Create memorable benchmarks for horizontal, day-to-day listening.
3.    Build ideas around personal and pop culture topics that create talk. Innovation fuels greater occasions of listening.
4     Develop short term "story arcs" around relevant content that carry people to the next day. (Can’t be missed moments) In PPM, listening longer is really about occasions of listening verses lengthening time exposed on a certain day.
5.    Seize moments and discover opportunities to reflect and showcase our characters through relevant news and pop culture events relatable to all.

I'll have a good form to use as you evaluate these things tomorrow.

Your Best Benchmarks Have Belly Buttons

They have characters, personal stories, loves, hates, points of view.  And, if you have any doubt of that, read this list of names and just try to convince me that you care less about THEM than you do "Battle Of The Sexes" or "War Of The Roses."

• Amy Robach
• Josh Elliott
• Robin Roberts
• Kelly and Michael
• Kathie Lee & Hoda
• Ann Curry
• Matt Lauer
• David Letterman
• Deborah Norville

Spend more time helping your people become voices that listeners personally relate to and care about than you do stealing someone else's benchmarks and content.

Marketing To Grow Loyalty

Loyalty marketing (social, data base, telemarketing and target campaigns) should also be a cornerstone of any country broadcaster's long-term plan. 

There is, however, another tool that is so inexpensive and easy to do that many stations overlook it as a good barometer of problems that might require more extensive quantitative research and/or marketing:  ask your listeners! 

Set up a panel of your active listeners, and meet with them on a regular basis.  We recommend airing an ongoing campaign of an nouncements on your air to inform listeners of the existence of your "Listener Advisory Board." 

Set up a link on your website for people to "sign up." 

Send a weekly station newsletter to the entire data base.  Do online research, set up a "get a clue" voice mail line for listener complaints/suggestions, and con stantly invite opinions on station programming on it.  Air listener-voiced comments and/or read their letters in regular promos to let people know you really do pay attention to their gripes and compliments.

Choose listeners at random from the panel to meet for a light dinner (restaurant or hotel trade) monthly with station staff and/or independent research people.  AOB will be happy to perform this function for you if a qualified moderator cannot be found at a local college or university marketing research department.  Keep us informed on problems and results if you choose to conduct the panels in-house.

Keep the groups small - less than 15 persons.  Use the panels to test potential marketing campaigns, TV commer cials, contests, morning show ideas, special programming, poten tially objectionable commercials, new music trends, etc. 

Recognize that you are NOT doing research, since the participants are aware of the station that is asking the questions.  However, since the bias in groups like this is to normally be quite com plimentary, when negatives come out they must be taken very seriously.

Actually, it has been our experience that country fans feel a sense of ownership of "their" radio station, and as a result when they are convinced that honesty will be taken seriously and result in changes on the air, they can be brutally frank and protective about the airwaves of their favorite station.

And, isn't that the way to make them feel involved and loyal to keep 'em listening longer? 

Besides, what competitor can take away your listeners when they feel like they all sit on your "Board of Directors"?

(More On) Loyalty

Country was a format with much greater loyalty 20 years ago. The mainstream AC listeners who were using Country as a P-2 back then are moving away from that format and are changing the face of the country audience now, growing our cume and shares, but reducing loyalty levels that we once took for granted.  And, that's not even mentioning the fickle Millenials who have been turning on to country since they were teens.

Success has it's costs, as the country audience becomes more like the mass culture and less qualitatively unique.

Another price of this growth:  once, country's "conversion ratio" was 1.42, but as average shares have increased, the format hasn't been able to convert ratings to revenue at the same rate.

The country format's growth is clearly less dependent than ever before on retaining long listening spans from a small base of very loyal listeners as less-loyal Gen Y has come into our universe. 

Just a few years ago, country would have been on the top of the list of 'loyal formats.'  Today, shifting demo targets, increased duplication, competition and PPM have made country radio less exclusive.  Diary measurement still picks up exclusive cumes (folks who write down no other radio station in their book other than their favorite one.  The great thing about PPM is the fact that the average radio station's cume doubles.  The bad news is that the average listener is shown to actually listen to almost twice as many radio stations as are seen in diaries and exclusive cume listeners are practically non-existent.

Next time, let's think about ways to improve the loyalty of your audience.

Loyalty: Even More Important Today

As markets become more compressed due to PPM's small samples and owners of the big combines fragment, niche and offer listeners more diverse choices to try to grow their combo share, loyalty is at a premium.

Passionate listenership patterns are the key to understanding what may happen when one station acquires a competitor which is starting to happen more now with deal-making starting to heat up again as station multiples have come down as lender money dried up due to the economy of the last few years. 

Sub-genres that live within a format -- if they create or improve passionate listenership due to narrower targeting of niches within a format-- can actually increase the overall shares for a format.  

My views, shaped by experience and observation:

"Jazz/NAC," Urban, and Urban Adult Contemporary are formats that actually grow when competing amongst themselves. This is because listening to these formats is so passionate that it eliminates outside listening.  For instance, a heritage Soft Adult Contemporary radio station may suffer at-work losses if an Urban AC or Jazz comes on but only from its African-American listeners.

Driving up share is also true in Rock, in that Rock listeners are loyal to the format, and, therefore, move between Rock, Classic Rock, Adult Alternative, and Alternative. The outside formats are the ones that suffer a new Rock station's arrival.

Adult Contemporary listeners are not format loyal, and, therefore, are tougher to convert.  If you have a Adult Contemporary station and you put on a Hot Adult Contemporary station, you'll undoubtedly damage yourself as these listeners tend to share their TSL with many other formats. It's all a matter of shelf space.  This can also happen as a Hot AC or CHR pulls an AC in a more "hot" direction.  Meanwhile, loyalty also diminishes for a soft AC station that fails to recognize the current music trends and remains too "soft" and "warm" for evolving demos.

The Classic Hits Format is not loyal within its life group; nor is Adult Alternative. This can be seen by the various Top 5 sharing patterns of these formats.

Adult Standards, by and large, stays on the AM band and is not format-loyal, but band-loyal.

Adult Urban is a highly loyal listener format. The benefit is that African-American listeners tend to listen longer to the radio than the average non-ethnic listener.

This is also true with Hispanic-targeted formats, but it's becoming less so because "first language" preference also plays a role as well, especially as Hispanic formats have broken into smaller pieces at a tremendous rate in many markets due to the growth of the Hispanic audience.

Business is generally AM band loyal as are News/Talk and Sports, as - for example - Entercom revealed in its recent Buffalo format finder research.  It was this format change that inspired this article. 

Most of the things that move up and down the AM band are loyal to AM, driven by the reality that by and large the difference between FM and AM listeners is age.

Putting Oldies, Standards/Nostalgia or Classic Country on an AM you own and News/Talk on another may be positive in that it limits the crossover between the two, for example.

You may have a tactical strategy to dominate News/Talk and, therefore, you opt to have a major News/Talk station that carries all of the big Talk shows and a secondary, lower-power AM station that presents the competing syndicated programs.

The plus here is that this keeps them off a competitor, but you are attacking yourself. 

It seems to me like moving a big news/talk station to FM or simulcasting an AM and FM cannibalizes the audience and in my view most often wastes an FM, leaving you with a weaker AM.

These are all broad generalizations, of course, and every market situation is unique, creating its own individual parameters.

More on loyalty tomorrow.

Break Off The Knob?

Yesterday, I shared the bullet point that Canadian country radio listeners are slightly less satisfied with their favorite country station than Americans are. (could that be because so many American country listeners have choices between more than one and in Canada there is no market with two competing FM country stations?)

Here is the other side of that coin and it’s great news for Canada’s country radio stations.

When asked how likely they would be to switch to something new, the Canadian listeners feel that it would be harder for a new radio station to get them to do so.

Call For Requests? Or, Excuses?

With Pandora nipping at our heels, at least in terms of their aspirations if not reality as yet, many listeners continue to feel like radio is their personal jukebox and the air personality's role is to play the songs they want when they want them.

That's why I strongly discourage use of the word "request" or "dedication" on the air. Request calls come from a VERY small portion of your audience and will undermine your music research and rotation systems. As a result, we prefer to call them "listener suggestion lines" or something similar.

However, since customer focus IS the key to success, what do you say when one of those "request consumers" calls with a complaint that "you never play my requests"?

Try this approach:

We receive many requests, sometimes more than we can actually play and still maintain what we perceive to be a popular music format. Due to the number of requests we get, if yours isn't aired right away, there are five possible reasons:

1. We may have just played that particular song or another song by the same artist.

2. We have a list of requests ahead of yours and we will eventually work our way up to yours.

3. We have literally hundreds of songs in our library and it may take some time to find the one you asked for.

4. The song you requested doesn't quite fit the mood of the program at the particular time, but it will be played later.

5. We simply don't have the song.

I see I have another song by the artist you asked for coming right up. How about if I play that one for you?

Most request line callers' motivation in phoning, texting, emailing and Facebooking has less to do with your actually playing their song on the air, than it does with their need to "feel special" to you.

Make them feel as good as possible -- without taking important time away from your show prep or without breaking the music for mat!

Then, you'll be serving the 95% of your cume who will NEVER call, but promptly will hit the preset or scan button of their radio if your music mix doesn't measure up to their expectations.

Close Up And Personal In Vancouver

Capping the Spring BBM survey period, JRfm's "Win to Get In Fan Jam with Jessie Farrell, George Canyon and Aaron Pritchett" last week was an awesome example of engaging entertainment.

It's more than an acoustic performance by a popular artist. Pattison Group Vancouver PD Gord Eno says: "I think we've developed a successful model for memorable Fan Jams. We gave JRfm fans something that they could never get otherwise, an intimate, spontaneous experience with three great performers who tore down the barrier between stage and audience. The audience was allowed to see a side of Aaron, Jessie and George that they hadn't seen before. It was real. Very real to us who have come to know these three people over the years and saw glimpses of their private personalities emerge. (Personalities Karen Daniels and Bob Say hosted and MC'd).

"The experience for our listeners to see the stars talk to each other, have fun, tell stories about their lives and the motivations behind lyrics was something they will talk about for the rest of their lives. This event didn't just happen. The idea started with a single phone call and evolved. Our generous listeners filled a big truck of baby supplies and stuffed over six grand into the donation box. We are already looking forward to when we can do something like this again."

Are Your Listeners So Loyal They Tell Their Friends About You?

I love this poll from Phil Rist of Big Research in Columbus on the political candidates. It seems like a very good gauge of strong loyalty.

The Net Promoter® Score* (NPS) has been called the “ultimate question” that can determine a company’s future. So what happens when you apply the NPS to the 3 major presidential candidates? BIGresearch did just that by asking more than 8,000 respondents to their April Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey to rank the candidates using the NPS and the results were compelling.

Here is how the NPS works: respondents are asked to rate, on a scale from 0 (Not at all likely) to 10 (Extremely likely), the probability they would recommend a candidate to a friend or coworker. 10 and 9 responses indicate Promoters, 8 and 7 responses are Passives and 0 through 6 are Detractors. NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

Here is how each of the major presidential candidates ranks according to their NPS among all consumers and by political party.

Obama Clinton McCain
All -48.8% -52.3% -56.0%
Democrats -13.4% -10.8% -82.2%
Republicans -84.0% -89.3% -9.1%
Independents -51.9% -63.0% -65.5%

Source: BIGresearch, April 08 CIA
*Net Promoter, NPS and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld

Clinton scores better than Obama among Democrats.

Interestingly, McCain has a better score within his own party than either Obama or Clinton do within their party which may be due to the competitive nature of the Democratic primary. McCain also scores better with Democrats than either Obama or Clinton do with Republicans which indicates more Democrats are likely to promote him than Republicans promote Obama or Clinton.

23% of respondents align themselves with the Independent Party, and candidates are aware that these are the votes crucial to their success. Obama is the candidate most likely to be recommended by an Independent. His NPS is considerably higher (-51.9%) when compared to Clinton’s (-63%) or McCain’s (-65.5%).

To view data tables for presidential candidates’ NPS, please click here: http://info.bigresearch.com/

What would your listeners say if they were asked if there's a radio station or personality that they enjoy so much that they tell their friends?

Are You Making Money From Your Reward Insider Points Program?

Take a lesson from the airlines and incent sales to grow non-spot dollars with your loyalty program.

Here are links to a few designed for radio which I like and many, many A&O clients use.

You can also design and create your own as well, of course, which means you OWN the database, which is a more time and resources-consuming way to go, but is naturally the ideal.

These folks do it that way. I have asked them if they'd syndicate it and they prefer to keep it proprietary.

Smart, eh?

Getting Listsners To Remember (And Write Down) How Long They Listen

KUSS, San Diego's Tony & Kris call their insider's loyalty club "TK+1" and invite members to say on the air "I listen to Tony & Kris 35 hours a week."

WPOC, Baltimore, can top that... with their "full time listener rewards," for listeners to say they listen for 40 hours a week. (note also what they have branded their HD side channel as a defensive tactic, to prevent anyone else in town to launch a "Wolf!")

What are YOU doing that seems to be working for you?