Never ask a question... Ask the right questions... Allow for the unexpected... Guest Columnist John N. Catlett

Never ask a question...

"Never ask a question..." begins the mantra of a trial lawyer, "unless you already know what the answer is going to be." The lawyer's objective is not so much to uncover the truth as it is to win the case. A radio programmer is out to win as well. His goal is to amass the largest possible audience in a desired demographic and keep them listening for a long time. As the number of voices in the media world has proliferated, the programmer's job has become more difficult. We still treasure the feedback from listeners who love everything we do, but we know they are no reflection of the real world. We may occasionally solicit criticism, but there is hardly ever a really useful suggestion that comes to us this way, beyond the recurrent "Don't run so many commercials." (Those complaints will continue regardless of your commercial load policy-particularly if your local commercials are not the best they can be.) As professional marketers, we try to keep in mind that the people we interact with in the normal course of our daily lives are not likely to be typical of the radio listeners we are trying to reach and satisfy.

Ask the right questions...

With the development of proven research techniques to find out what radio listeners really like and dislike, most competitive radio stations in markets of any size are now conducting regular studies to guide their managers' own instincts. We know that we must ask the right questions of the right respondents to obtain accurate, actionable information. We are sophisticated enough to be aware that a self-selected sample is unlikely to be representative of the breadth of the entire target audience or even necessarily typical of all your existing listeners. Far too often I see research projects designed by programmers who, like the trial lawyer, are minimizing the chance for surprises. While it may be inwardly satisfying to have an expensive research study confirm the wisdom of what you're already doing, it does not teach you a thing! My experiences in managing radio stations outside the United States over the past twenty years have yielded surprise after surprise. However, if our research projects had been shielded against them, those stations would never have become as successful as they are today.

Allow for the unexpected...

In Moscow in the early 1990s, Radio 7 was looking for guidance on what music would help develop a high- quality image with educated and wealthy Russians that advertisers wanted to reach. One-on-one open-ended interviews with a small sampling of potential listeners yielded a surprising result. While they liked a lot of international pop music from the West, they also valued and appreciated well-known serious classical music. Without that unexpected suggestion, we never would have tested any classical selections along with the Western music we expected to be well-received. The classics tested best of all. Radio Seven to this day includes at least one classical selection in its playlist every hour! More recently in India we were preparing to launch the country's very first non-government station in the city of Bangalore. We hired a staff of bright, with-it young people, and they looked forward to creating a new station that would reflect the hip musical preferences of their city of some seven million people. Central to Bangalore's image is its "pub culture", with well over 100 pubs blasting the latest Western music to enthusiastic crowds of young people. We reserved nearly half our test for our staff's selection of the Western hits they knew and liked best. Since Bollywood--India's film industry--movies are popular throughout India, we also tested a lot of music from these films, in spite of the fact that the language is Hindi, which is very rarely spoken in Bangalore. We were stunned by the results of the test, conducted against a carefully recruited random sample of young people in the top socioeconomic groups. In a 1200 song test, fewer than 20 Western songs scored in the top 500 selections! In spite of the city's reputation for the "pub culture", broad everyday use of the English language, and contrary to the tastes of our own staff, the overwhelming preference of our target audience was for Hindi film music. The lesson is that it is essential to design research that allows for the possibility of an unexpected result. If instead you prepare like a trial lawyer for research that will not surprise you, you will get only a (possibly false) confirmation of your own prejudices. For a radio programmer, unlike a trial lawyer, you only win when you really uncover the truth!

Guest Columnist John N. Catlett

John N. Catlett is a lifelong radio broadcaster. He brought the first mass audiences to FM in the 1970s, introducing WCBS-FM/New York's oldies format in 1972. The past twenty years he has worked outside his native United States. His unlicensed shipboard Laser 558 attracted twelve million weekly listeners. For Atlantic 252 he brought large audiences and profitability to an Irish longwave frequency. He helped build and manage a group of stations in Eastern Europe and Russia for Metromedia, and he has just completed a three-year assignment for Rupert Murdoch's Star Group, introducing the first private FMs to India. He is available for either short- or long-term assignments and is reachable via the Internet address JNCatlett@aol.com.