Are You Taking Ownership?
By David Kidd, BPR
With networking deeply entrenched in the radio industry around the world, there has become a trend to apply the corporate brand to various elements on the stations.
Listen live via the XYZ app, not listen live via the Station Name App.
Same with newsrooms. Where stations in a network all source news from the same newsroom, many are using terms such as the XYZ News Hub or the XYZ News Centre to brand each bulletin rather than Station Name News.
The thing is in most strategic studies conducted by BPR in countries globally news & information positions are always in the Top 10, usually Top 5.
The listeners want their favourite radio station to provide the news & information to keep them up to date with what’s going on in the world.
A recent study revealed, as usual, that news & information positions were extremely important to the audience overall and to all stations’ P1’s. Yet one network in the market used a corporate brand on their news bulletins for all their stations.
These stations no longer own the news & information positions perceptually as they once did when the news bulletins were branded with the individual station names.
The thing is, listeners want THEIR favourite STATION to provide the news & information, not some corporate entity which they probably haven’t heard of before.
To complicate things even further, the awareness of the corporate news brand was very low.
It’s yours…. they want it…. own it!
Great point, David. I attribute a station’s failure to ‘own’ the News to laziness and errant network egotism. Listeners don’t bond with a network — they bond with a station and its on-air staff.