Mason's Morning Minute

Trying Not Be Become Irrelevant

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

Our music positioning isn’t working as well as it used to be. Something’s changed, and it’s hard to put your finger on it. So how do we know what’s going on? Why is it changing, and what does that mean?

For an answer, let’s look to that great radio strategist Frederick Herzberg.

OK, so he doesn’t have anything to do with radio, but we can learn a concept from him that’s new to us but old in management circles. Herzberg was a noted psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management. His 1968 publication, “One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?” is one of the most requested articles from the Harvard Business review.

Herzberg theorized that the factors causing satisfaction are different from those causing dissatisfaction; the two feelings cannot simple be treated as opposites. The opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction, but rather no satisfaction. Think of your medical and health benefits for example. Once upon a time everyone didn’t have them, and it was a real drawing point. Today, almost everyone has health care of some sort, so it’s not as much as a “satisfier” as it used to be, but without it you can be very dissatisfied.

Translating that to radio, it means that at one point, where radio was the center of most things music, and the primary place you found both new music and your favorite music, it was a satisfier. Now, when you can get the music from so many different places, AND create your own playlist on an iPod. So playing the music the listeners want to hear has become a baseline, an expectation or the price of admission rather than a strategic point of attraction. However, if you’re not playing what they want to hear, it is a dissatisfier, and will hurt you. By continuing to treat it as a satisfier, you’re in danger of becoming irrelevant.

In essence, the more something becomes widely available it loses its ability to be a satisfier, and it switches to a dissatisfier. Just think about that a minute. How much of what you’re doing has to do with the satisfiers of yesterday? And, of course, what are the satisfiers of today?

So, what exactly are you promoting these days?

Patiently waiting for irrelevance

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. [Chief of Staff, U. S. Army]

It was a huge shock to the French in 1939 when their impressive fixed-position defenses didn’t help them at all. Instead of following the common wisdom of the day and attacking their strong points, the Germans created the bypass attack, where you went completely around the strong points to snap up the rest of the land, leaving the fixed defense positions isolated from each other. Interestingly, it was the same thing they’d done in other countries earlier in the war, and what they’d do to others after France fell. The strategists of the time couldn’t deal with such a huge change, so they reacted as they always have, and lost.

Change is a real pain. At one point everything we learned about success, everything that we’ve become expert at, begin to work against us, as we desperately hang onto it. It’s a little like the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

But what if we bypassed the first four stages, and went directly to acceptance, and then moved one beyond to embracing the change that’s affecting us?

Much of radio is in the denial stage right now. There’s no way all this Internet, social networking, and “consumer generated content” will replace radio.” We’ll just wait it out. I’ll stick with the tried and true, contests, slogans, and ‘push programming.”

If we embraced this coming change, and it is going to happen whether we like it or not, we’d see how much social networking is like radio, and that instead of focusing on the delivery platform, radio, we should be paying attention to content. And no, just because you have great DJ’s and “the best mix” on the air doesn’t mean you have great content. Content is not just the song playing now and what the jock will say afterwards, in an infinite string of sequential events. Content is a unique set of elements only your station has, that creates an experience in the listeners mind, that makes them want to come back again. It’s about staying relevant.

Makes you want to scream, doesn’t it?

What are you doing, right now, to embrace the changes going on around you? Are you desperately hanging on to tactics that don’t seem to work as well, or are you crafting a strategy for dealing with the inevitable changes the future is bringing.