Blog

Mit Marketing allein lässt sich ein schlechter Radiosender nicht retten

Von David Kidd, BPR

When a station’s cume starts falling, one of the first responses is often:

“We need more marketing.”

Maybe.

But marketing isn’t a cure-all solution for bad ratings.

If cume is in a downward trend across several surveys, something is happening. Fewer people are choosing the station. Before spending money telling people to listen, it might be worth finding out why they stopped.

That means the first move shouldn’t be a marketing brief.

It should be a product audit and a properly conducted market research study.

In 2026, radio isn’t simply competing with other radio stations. It’s competing with Spotify, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok and an almost infinite supply of entertainment.

That makes the product more important, not less.

Has the music become too predictable? Is the Breakfast content losing some of its appeal? Are the personalities genuinely entertaining or talking for the sake of talking? Is there too much clutter? Has the station’s position become blurred? Has a competitor found a better way of satisfying the same listener needs?

And perhaps the most important question:

Is there still a compelling reason to choose this station?

Of course, marketing is important. Marketing can create awareness. It can generate trial. It can remind former listeners that you’re still there.

What it cannot do is make an ordinary product compelling.

Marketing is an amplifier.

If the station is strong, distinctive and entertaining, marketing can accelerate growth. But if the product has quietly gone stale, marketing can simply introduce more people to the problem.

You persuade them to come back, they listen, discover nothing has really changed…or has deteriorated….and they disappear again.

You’ve just paid for the privilege of reminding them why they left.

There’s another reason the product i.e the content matters more in 2026.

Radio’s greatest competitive advantage against Spotify, algorithms and AI-generated audio isn’t that it can play music. Everybody can do that.

It’s the things those platforms struggle to do: personality, spontaneity, companionship, local relevance and the sense that something is happening right now.

Those are product decisions, not marketing decisions.

So when the cume trend starts heading south, the sequence should be simple:

Diagnose. Fix. Market.

Find out why people are leaving. Fix the things driving them away. Make the station distinctive and worth rediscovering.

If the product audit comes back clean, then perhaps you genuinely do have an awareness problem.

But if the product isn’t good enough, don’t spend money telling more people about it.

Fix it first. Then market the hell out of it.

Because marketing is a terrific amplifier. But first, you need something worth amplifying.

Wenn die kumulierte Reichweite eines Radiosenders (Cume) zu sinken beginnt, lautet eine der ersten Reaktionen häufig: „Wir brauchen mehr Marketing.“ Vielleicht. Aber Marketing ist kein Allheilmittel gegen schlechte Einschaltquoten.