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The Power of Positioning: The Battle Before the Radio Is Switched On

By Peter Don, BPR

In the last issue we looked at how habit, not choice, drives listening. This issue: why the position a station owns in the listener’s mind decides whether those habits ever form.

Why Positioning Matters

If habit is the engine of listening, positioning is the map it follows. Nobody carries a considered evaluation of every station; they carry a shorthand, formed years ago and rarely revisited. That shorthand, not the output, decides who tunes in. Which is why the most consequential battles in radio are fought not on air but in the mind of the listener, as two very different brands discovered.

The New Coke lesson:

Coca-Cola learned a lesson, expensively, in 1985. Under pressure from Pepsi, it reformulated its flagship product. The logic was impeccable: New Coke won blind taste tests, including against Pepsi, and the research investment ran to millions of dollars. The consumer response was fury. Protest groups formed, hotlines were flooded, and people hoarded cases of the original. Within three months, Coca-Cola retreated and reintroduced Coca-Cola Classic. The mistake was not one of product quality but of understanding: consumers were not buying a taste; they were buying a habit and an identity. The research measured the liquid; the loyalty was to the brand. Radio stations attempting reinvention rarely get off so lightly because they seldom have a “Classic” formula to bring back.

Radio’s Cautionary Tale

Radio has its own version of the story. In the mid-1990s, BBC Radio 1 set out to reposition itself for a younger audience, replacing veteran presenters and overhauling its sound. The strategic intent was arguably sound, but the transition demonstrated the doubly negative effect brutally. Millions of listeners departed within a couple of years; some followed favourite voices to other stations, many simply found the ritual broken and formed new habits.

At BPR, we saw this firsthand while working with UK Local radio. Changes on Radio 1 provided an opportunity to reset the radio landscape. Radio 1 chased a new, younger audience, while some local stations attacked with the line ‘No Rap – Less Chat’. This admittedly corny line was both accurate and memorable, and helped create a clear positioning separation from Radio 1.

The younger audience Radio 1 wanted did not arrive on anything like the same scale or timetable as their losses because they were able to identify alternatives in stations that delivered a strong music and entertainment promise.

Radio 1 eventually rebuilt a fresh identity around a genuinely new position, but the journey cost a fortune in audience, took years, and survived largely because a licence-fee-funded broadcaster could absorb losses no commercial operator could withstand.

The research trap

There is a further complication, and it catches even diligent operators. Ask listeners in a focus group whether they want more variety, fewer adverts, newer music or fresher presenters, and they will say yes to all of it. People are articulate about change in the abstract and conservative about it in practice. What they tell researchers they want and what their habits will actually reward are different things: stated preference comes from the thinking mind, listening behaviour from the automatic one. Coca-Cola’s taste tests are the definitive example: the research was accurate, but the conclusion was wrong. Programmers who redesign a station only around identified preferences may be building for a listener who does not exist.

The rush to the middle

The research trap has an industry-wide consequence. Because every station asks the same questions and hears the same answers, formats converge. Breakfast shows across the dial deliver a near-identical formula: the same mix of voices, the same feature bench, the same celebrity chatter, and playlists separated by a handful of songs. When positioning discipline fades, the middle becomes crowded, and nothing in the listener’s mind separates one brand from another.

Stations then reach for the only levers left. The first is contests and giveaways, which rent attention rather than earn it; the prize-driven listener is the least loyal, while large parts of the audience find the interruptions actively irritating. The second is loudness, in both senses: shoutier on-air delivery and heavier marketing. But volume is not position. Shouting a message that says nothing distinctive simply adds to the overcommunication that made consumers switch off in the first place. Both are the tactics of brands that no longer know what they are for. A station with a clear position never needs to bribe or bellow its way into the listener’s day; it simply becomes part of it.

K-Earth: leveraging heritage positioning to success

On the other side of these examples is K-Earth, Los Angeles. K-Earth was a heritage ‘Oldies’ station based on core 60s songs and artists (think Beatles, Beach Boys and Monkees). Today K-Earth still plays oldies but the centre of the format now rests in the 80s rather than the 60s.

The point here is that K-Earth moved its music two decades without ever leaving its position: it remained “the station that plays the songs you grew up with” by simply letting the definition of “you” move with the generations.

K-Earth is the #1 station in Los Angeles.

Working with human nature, not against it

None of this argues for stagnation. Formats age, audiences age, and stations that never evolve eventually die of demographic arithmetic. It argues instead for honesty about what your brand means in the listener’s mind, rather than in the strategy document, and for respecting how slowly perception moves. Evolution that deepens an existing position compounds the power of habit; each change feels like the station becoming more itself. Revolution that contradicts the position fights human nature, and human nature usually wins. If a genuinely new position is required, it is often cheaper to launch a new brand than to bend an old one, which is precisely why the major radio groups run portfolios rather than perpetually re-inventing single stations.

The strongest stations are not those that chase audiences, but those that become impossible to think about leaving, because nobody thinks about them at all.

Further reading:

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg