There has been and will continue to be much written on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It’s had such a pop culture impact, don’t be surprised if the consequences of his erratic management decisions are the subject of a Harvard course down the road. Yet I can’t help but notice that reaction to Musk’s decisions at Twitter is predominantly about their effect on Twitter. To be sure, those effects have reached far and wide, from fired staff to banned (and reinstated) users to random unscientific polls being used to make important strategic decisions.

What particularly fascinates me is how Elon Musk committed a brand violation.

Why was Elon Musk so willing to firebomb his carefully crafted images around innovation and vision? He founded a space company and an electric car company, and by most measures, both were doing quite well.

If you stepped into 2023 not knowing anything about Musk’s political leanings, you’d almost certainly assume he’s always been far-right. He’s railed against Covid restrictions, Joe Biden, and “woke” politics. He unbanned Donald Trump from Twitter. He tweeted a link to a conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

And yet, on November 7^th, 2022, he tweeted, “To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.”

If that’s true, maybe that’s the whole point. Musk was able to keep his positive images intact because most everyone didn’t know what his political bent was. Nobody cared.

Obviously not every Tesla owner drives one to save the environment, but surely plenty do. And it’s no surprise that environmental protection polls better with liberals than conservatives. If you start to make your personal politics public, especially when they may be out of sync with your consumers, that’s dangerous territory.

Musk injecting politics into his business is just one example of a brand violation, yet there are many we see across sectors including audio entertainment.

We’ve seen morning personalities on music radio stations cross the line of what’s expected of the station or show’s respective brand, including injecting polarizing political content.

We’ve seen personalities on Soft Adult Contemporary stations attempt to be too foreground, when listeners of that format tend to want a soothing background presentation that puts the music first.

ESPN and other sports outlets regularly wrestle with a classic brand violation of the format. How much non-sports content can it get away with? When ESPN tried to veer too far from sports with a unique presentation of SportsCenter with Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, it failed because that’s not what viewers expected of SportsCenter. Smith himself called it “a bad fit.”

Jemele Hill and Michael Smith’s version of Sportscenter on ESPN was by Smith’s admission, a “bad fit.”

And so, The Elon Musk Twitter experiment will live as a crucial branding lesson, the types of lessons we learn often when studying audio brands. Understand your perceptions, track them, and ensure the content you generate is in sync with the consumer expectations or expect erratic and negative results.

Also, don’t mix politics with consumer products.

As we spend four weeks of December revisiting some of our most-read blogs over the past four years, we find this week’s entry to be remarkably appropriate from a timing standpoint. It is also the most buzzed about Tuesdays With Coleman blog since we started the series.

The timing is appropriate because “Should Radio Go Back to Normal” by Jon Coleman was published one year ago. In fact, exactly one year ago tomorrow, when things in the world (and the Radio industry) were decidedly not normal. Thankfully, although the wrath of Covid is still highly relevant and impactful, the business has returned to much healthier levels and there is a sense of optimism for 2022.

Jon’s blog was about using the pandemic pause to reassess the future of the Radio industry, and he offered a wide range of thought starters and ideas. Many were also introduced for the first time to Blue Ocean Strategy. You may read this and feel great about how far we’ve come in one year, maybe you’ll think nothing has really changed, or perhaps your feelings will fall somewhere in the middle.

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

“Should Radio Go Back to Normal?” by Jon Coleman

The inclination of many will be to write off 2020 as a horrible year for the world and for our business. The question is, will radio “get back to normal” in 2021 or 2022 or should it be focused on a new business model?

Significant challenges often force industries to reevaluate, and some good can come out of this one. It may not be what everyone in the industry wants to hear, but companies are being forced to focus on return on investment (ROI). By that I am not even talking about financial ROI, though that is a part of it, but consumer ROI. What things really generate audience and audience loyalty? Which stations and shows will get a consumer ROI? As an industry, making consumer ROI a priority will require care, balancing broad appeal with a likely slow but narrowing focus to generate more core passion. Plus, as I will address below, I think it is time to start investigating totally new opportunities for radio stations and companies.

But first, let me talk about the here and now. Radio’s workforce­­–including owners, General Managers, and Program Directors–have been tasked to do more with less. This requires a laser focus on things that really matter. This does not mean that every cost cutting move is a good one or that radio can be fully healthy by cutting left and right. Owners need to know what the wheat is and what the chaff is.

So, what is the wheat and what is the chaff? What matters? First, format dominant and revenue critical stations matter. They are the wheat that will get radio to the future. Also, strong personalities, strong music, and strong leaders on those stations matter.

But, all this is a status quo or defensive strategy. It is likely to extend the life of the best stations well into the future, but it is not the dramatic cure that will attract new non-users to the medium in large numbers and as passionate fans. Radio needs offensive strategies. Just as you can’t win a football game without an offense, radio cannot reinvigorate the medium with defense alone. It needs to play great defense right now, but it also needs an offensive strategy going forward.

I think the offensive strategy begins with the weak stations that may fill a format hole, but do little for the future. Radio needs to look to new ways to truly energize the medium. This comes from changing the paradigm about how we program our weakest stations. Right now our paradigm for these weak stations is music, news/talk, 12 commercials an hour, music sweeps, stop sets, morning shows, etc. It’s the world we live in and the world advertisers live in. And it’s been essentially unchanged for decades.

Coleman Insights believes in the importance of these elements for the majority of the most successful stations.  Music is still an overwhelmingly important listener benefit, but we also recognize that competition for the music listener is getting harder every day and will get harder in the future.

However, looking down the road, there may not be enough music lanes to support three to five stations in a cluster. And the weakest music or talk stations trick us into thinking we don’t need to think about more important changes that might actually grow the audience and revenue opportunities on these signals. There are already weak sisters in every company and every cluster and there will be more down the road. Employing the strategies of the successful sisters may not be enough for the weaker sister stations.

This is where the current paradigm meets the new competitive world. In order to grow as a medium and stop playing just defense, we must examine other paradigms. We need to find values for consumers that go beyond just our music and personalities. Radio must find new ways by experimenting.  I don’t mean throwing ideas willy-nilly against the wall, but strategically considering all ideas, evaluating them carefully, and then throwing them against the wall.

We need to find new ways of attracting both non-consumers and current listeners and making them passionate about what we offer. We do this by creating uncontested market space for growth, rather than continuing to attempt to compete in a vicious sea of competition in a shrinking profit pool. This technique is called Blue Ocean Strategy. Radio is in the bloody, shark-infested “red” section of the ocean, fighting with itself and constantly emerging competitors. It should be creating new, innovative, never-before-heard concepts to draw new audience in the clear “blue” section of the ocean. Radio needs to Blue Ocean its world. We need to stop thinking about how we can get people to listen to our clusters’ weak stations a little more just so we can squeeze in six more minutes a day and marginally increase our time spent listening (which is generally pointless or at best a stalling tactic) but instead think about what role radio might play in the lives of consumers in the media world in which we increasingly live. Use this process to develop new types of programs within existing stations or totally new formats that don’t rely on music, stop sets, and the rules of the last 40 years. This does not mean throwing out good principled programming “rules” (throwing the baby out with the bathwater), but it does mean setting up a small tub next to the big one in which we can play with new ideas (smartly experiment).

To that end we need to ask: What groups of consumers are there that don’t listen to radio or do not listen a lot? What interests and excites them? What media do they consume and why?

We should also rethink how we segment the audience. What segments of the population are not currently served by the media landscape as it stands now? Perhaps we should set aside the traditional demographics we use to segment audience and start examining how our country is reorganizing along nontraditional lines. Rural/Urban, Secular/Religious, etc. Are there lifestyle segments that might be passionate if they were served? Are there new ways of segmenting political segments versus the traditional conservative, moderate, and liberal? Does the move to the left and right in many media create an opportunity in the middle?

What kinds of formats that radio does not or only minimally offers could create new interest in the medium? Could there be talk radio targeted at women? Does the popularity of Dave Ramsey suggest a full time personal finance station? Could radio play a bigger role in the emerging podcast market by having a format devoted to the leading podcasts (on FM)? Is it time to bring back progressive talk radio?  Could a well done national financial news-focused news/talk station find success on FM (versus being relegated to 1500am) in 2021? Could a Black news network on big FM signals draw a substantial audience? All of these are totally different from radio’s main offerings today or are a clearly narrowing of the appeal in search of a more passionate audience.

And, just as we need to think about our radio programming paradigm, we may need to think even harder about the economics of radio. Can new stations be built successfully on a basis other than selling commercials to local advertisers? Is local spot business the only way of doing it? Would the revenue proposition be different if the product on our stations was entirely different?

We can write off 2020 and go back to normal in 2021, or we can view 2020 as an opportunity to challenge ourselves in 2021 and bring new people to the medium. We can do this by creating new experiences and not mimicking the programming we offer right now. We can do this by creating programming that is so manifestly different that it creates a whole new expectation and is compelling enough to truly impact potential radio consumers and fans.

In late 2017, Coleman Insights introduced Tuesdays With Coleman, a weekly blog series offering tips and insights on branding, content, and research strategy. Using a combination of Google Analytics and reader engagement, we’re spending the next few weeks presenting the most impactful blogs of the past four years by reprinting one blog per year. Many of the themes are timeless and worth revisiting. Unsurprisingly, the first blog was authored by Coleman Insights founder Jon Coleman, the scribe on two of the four.

Here’s 2018’s featured blog from September 25th of that year. In this blog, Jon uses concepts such as Outside Thinking, the Brand-Content Matrix, and the introduction of the Acceptance-Fit Matrix to explain why a song’s popularity isn’t a good enough reason on its own to play it.

“Should I Play That Song On My Radio Station?” by Jon Coleman

For radio program directors, the question of which songs to play and which to leave out is as old as the medium itself.  If it was only about playing popular songs, radio stations would be broader than they are.  Why is that?  Well, just like restaurants don’t all serve the same popular foods and generally must choose what to serve, radio stations also focus on types, styles and eras of music.

Pizza Hut doesn’t sell hamburgers. CHR stations don’t play country.

Outback Steakhouse doesn’t sell Chinese food. Rock stations don’t play pop music.

Chipotle doesn’t sell pancakes. Hip Hop stations don’t play Taylor Swift.

These choices seem obvious, but are they always?  How can a program director think about what to play when consumers listen to popular music and music that seems right for the format?  How can they know when to stretch beyond the narrowest definition of their format?  When can they take chances and when should they play it safe?

Just as they choose restaurants and most brands based on simplistic image perceptions, consumers also select radio stations based on an image they have of that station.

As we’ve illustrated in our explanations of Outside Thinking, that image may be formulated based on Type (like Rock, Country or Hip Hop); Era (like 80s, 90s or 00s); or Texture (like Hard, Soft or Upbeat).

But in the real world, not every song a station plays will meet the pure definition of the brand it represents to its audience.

Sometimes, a program director will want to throw in a song just to “freshen things up.”

Other times a song will reach such a high level of popularity in the zeitgeist, a program director may feel compelled to play it even if it is outside the format lane.

Program directors will fill their music tests with “fishing expeditions” to see what happens.

Every program director and music director is faced with the decision of whether or not to play songs on their stations and is left questioning if it was the right choice because of Fit.

So, when to play and when not to play?

Don Benson, the former President and CEO of Lincoln Financial Media, put it something like this:

You can be entrepreneurial in your own lane. You can’t be entrepreneurial in your fringe lanes.

What Don means by that is your format lane gives you license to introduce your audience to songs and even sounds they haven’t heard. When you play outside your lane, you risk losing listeners and may encourage brand erosion.

For most listeners, this isn’t a conscious thought process. In the moment, if they really like it, a listener may sit through a song that feels out of sync with the brand and wait for the radio station to return to expectation. If they don’t really like it, and it’s out of sync, the listener is less likely to stay.

The real danger here is, if a station plays out-of-sync songs too often—songs that aren’t consistent with its brand perception—the listener will lose confidence in the station’s ability to deliver what the listener wants.

The Coleman Insights Brand-Content Matrix^SM dictates that the success of great radio stations is the result of two dimensions. First, the station’s brand strength—its top of mind awareness and perception. Second, its in-the-moment content strength—a function of how compelling the content is. The Brand-Content Matrix shows the most successful radio stations marry high-quality content with a well-established brand.

In many ways, the decision-making process on whether or not to play a song on your radio station can be handled in much the same way…using an Acceptance-Fit Matrix.

Ideally, your radio station will play a high percentage of songs that test well (High Acceptance) and fit your station’s brand (High Fit).

But, there always will be moments of questioning.

In the late 80s and very early 90s, for example, pop music took a milder, less edgy turn. During this period, artists like Richard Marx, Mike and the Mechanics, Wilson Phillips and Michael Bolton topped the charts.

How was CHR supposed to live without Michael Bolton?

For CHR stations, playing too much of this fringe ACish sound risked undermining their brand expectation. The expectations were edgier and had more tempo. The center-lane pop was from artists like Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna.

Stations had to be careful how quickly and deeply to move into the fringe sound—not just for fear of brand erosion, but also the risk of making themselves vulnerable to attack by more focused formats like Hot AC or edgier stations like Hip Hop.

As the Acceptance-Fit Matrix indicates, if a song is outside your own lane, it had better be exceptionally popular to play it.  A song that is exceptionally popular but not in the center lane is in the lower right quadrant. You may be able to get away with that. But, if it is only moderately popular it will be a tune out and will hurt your image.

Our recommendation is to evaluate every song in your library in terms of both Acceptance and Fit.

Aim for highly popular songs that are a great fit with your brand.

The less it fits your brand, the more selective you should be.

So when it’s time to ask “should I play that song on my radio station?”

Be smart.

Be thoughtful.

Be strategic.

And, be entrepreneurial.

Just do it in your own lane.