Radio Drops #17: Positioning

Positioning – The Battle For Your Mind

Music radio is a self-taught craft. To be more successful, read all you can find about media. “Positioning – The Battle For Your Mind” was published in the early 80s. It has a big influence on the thinking of radio program directors at the time. Its simple lessons can still inspire new ideas about how to promote, brand and “position” your radio station within the cluttered mediascape of the 21st century.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #17: Positioning

Find the Hole and Fill It

I want to talk about one of the books that influenced my thinking about the radio business: how we relate to our listeners, and how music radio positions itself in the wave of portable music sources our culture has made available to everybody with a smartphone.

There’s that word: position. How do you position your radio station among all those portable music sources? You’ll recognize it better as branding. But the book describes it more as filling a hole, and I’ll get to that.

The book is Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. It was written by a couple of advertising guys, Jack Trout and Al Ries. Parts of their little thesis first appeared in the trade paper Advertising Age in 1972, and they published the book in 1981. It had a big influence on the advertising business. Agencies bought multiple copies for all their creatives.

It spurred a lot of interest among radio programmers too, because we were beginning to face more competition. The American FCC had started allowing more stations and more frequencies to broadcast, particularly FM. There was a lot of growth from the ’50s up to the ’70s. The only competition a top 40 station really had was another top 40 station in town, and the one with the more powerful signal was almost always on top of the ratings.

Music radio blossomed on FM in the 1970s and into the ’80s. In Milwaukee, where I was a CHR program director at the time, there were seven stations playing various pop music mixes, and each of the other six played a handful of songs that were also on my playlist. That’s not counting the country stations or the urban stations. Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton were crossing over from country onto the top 40 CHR charts, and of course there was always a lot of R&B in a CHR mix.

That was more competition than I had ever faced. There’s no school, there are no college courses for how to market a radio station. You’ve got to educate yourself, be in the belly of the beast and figure things out. You need to read books about all kinds of media to understand how we all come together and where we fit in the mix.

The premise of positioning is that people can only retain and recall a couple of brands of any product. Take soft drinks: Coke, that’s the number one position. Coffee: Starbucks. Fast food: McDonald’s.

Trout and Ries quote a psychologist who said the average human mind can’t deal with more than seven units at a time. Ask someone to name every brand of a product and the most they can come up with is seven, and that’s if they have a high interest in it. For a low-interest product, it’s usually one or two.

Trout and Ries picture it as a little ladder in people’s heads. The brand name on the top rung has the number one position, and it’s usually the one that got there first. Think of Starbucks: there was no national coffee brand until Starbucks.

If you’re a challenger, you can’t take the number one position from the big guy by attacking head on. You’ve got to find a hole and fill that hole. One of the ways to do that is to tell the prospect, in our case the potential listener, what you are not.

Here’s an example. The market has a solid, highly rated album rock station, and another station switches to the format. The established station has been playing a lot of what you’d call mellow rock, like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and such. The album rock challenger tells its listeners: “We don’t play that wimpy elevator music. We rock the city with AC/DC.”

You face way more competition for listeners’ ears than I ever did. It takes brain power, ideas and self-education to figure your way down the path to radio success. The book is Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

More on this: Talent Tips 1991, Positioning Statement Ideas

In Radio Drops #17, I talked about Positioning as the marketing mantra before it came to being called: Branding today. From my radio archives, I found the article below. Jay Trachman was a radio personality “coach”. He wrote a lot of articles in our trade papers and published several small, handy books about the DJ craft.

The radio airwaves had been getting more crowded when this was written. Radio programmers were all in search of the magical phrases that would help cement their Station name and the attributes of their particular music formatting mix. As you deal with an even more crowded listeners-sphere that we all now face, you may find a gem of an idea in how thinking was going back there in 1991.