Mason's Morning Minute

"A brand is not an icon, a slogan, or a mission statement. It is a promise — a promise your company can keep. First you find out, using research, what promises your customers want companies like yours to make and keep, using the products, processes and people in your company. Then you look at your competition and decide which promise would give you the best competitive advantage. This is the promise you make and keep in every marketing activity, every action, every corporate decision, and every customer interaction. You promote it internally and externally. The promise drives budgets and stops arguments. If everyone in the company knows what the promise is, and knows that they will be rewarded or punished depending on the personal commitment to the promise, politics and personal turf issues start to disappear." - Kristin Zhivago in Business Marketing

Yes, your station is making a promise. It may be that you’re an anti-establishment rock station, or a relaxing and refreshing AC, your listeners are reading a promise into what you do. The only real question is whether you want a hand in developing what your promise is.

A promise can be explicit, such as a “Family Friendly” promise, or it can be implicit, by focusing on and being family friendly, but it’s there.

A huge mistake we’ve been making is building a promise around a tangible part of your radio station. 40 minutes of music every hour, or the “best mix” reduces your promise to something easily copied and less important to a listener today. True brands are built on the intangible facets of your radio station, which are more difficult to copy and more meaningful to the people who are your listeners.

But like most promises, we need to prove what they think. If you’re like most people in radio you don’t spend much time thinking about what your promise is, and even less time creating ways to prove your promise. Focus is probably something you reserve for your target or your music genre, but in fact it’s much more important to focus your actions on proving your promise in ever decision you make.

What’s your promise? And more importantly, how are you proving it?

Building Talent With Honesty

"My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too." – Jack Welch

I love Jack Welch. Don’t know the man, and know his reputation as “Neutron Jack,” who seems to have downsized half of America, but there’s more of a balance to his thinking than just that. Unlike the green eye-shade myopics of consolidated radio, Welch has a focus on developing people too.

His thoughts on development revolve around being candid with people, and “differentiating” them by performance, through his 20/70/10 plan.

The 20 are those in the top 20% of performers in the organization, and you pay them well, love them, bonus them, and give them attention. They are your difference between success and failure, and they reside at ever level and in every department.

The 70 are the 70% of people in the middle. With them you tell them what they need to be in the top 20%, and give them the tools to make it happen. You encourage and coach them to be better on an ongoing basis.

It’s the bottom 10% where the controversy begins, because Welch suggests you be completely honest and open, and council them to find work elsewhere, and in some cases cut them loose. But that doesn’t mean mass firings, it means giving them candid feedback and a chance to improve, and if they don’t helping them find work elsewhere.

Welch is right that radio, like most other businesses, isn’t candid with its employees, especially on-air talent. Not everyone is a top performer, and if we can’t help them get there, we have to let them go. To do otherwise is a failure on our part.

Helping Manage Change

"Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm." — Peter Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)

Few people like change, and fewer still actually embrace it. But those of us who do need to make sure we’re not doing more damage than good. From not understanding the importance of people, who the change really impacts after all, to the way different people have a different perspective on change.

Fortunately I found a great article on the biggest mistakes in managing change, and you can find it here.

Still, change is all around us, every day. From gas guzzling giants like the Escalade to the 40 mpg SmartCar. From Filofax to iPhone, from Churban to Rhythmic to Hispanic Rhythmic. I’d like to say the only time change doesn’t effect you is when you’re dead, but we all know about decomposition.

It’s not important how you feel about change, only that you understand how to deal with it, because if you can’t ignore it you have to learn how to deal with it, as it’s going to happen whether you like it or not.

Trendhunter

Unlocking Cool - By Jeremy Gutsche, TrendHunter.com

From: trendhunter, 1 year ago

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By methodically approaching innovation, organizations and individuals can generate ideas, stimulate creativity, and ultimately unlock cool. The UNLOCKING COOL presentation is typically delivered as a keynote speach with the slides used as a reference for the discussion.

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Building Connections With Listeners

“It’s about connections. I want to connect with people; I want to make people think “Yeah, that’s how I feel.” And if I can do that, that’s an accomplishment." - Carole King

Want to know about one of the most important changes in programming? It’s that it’s no longer “good enough” to have simple announcers trying to be funny or entertaining, or, on the other hand, simply doing the “that was/this is” thing. People want to be more involved in radio, to be more than a passive listener, and that happens when you connect with them.

OK, most people can agree with that – we need to connect with our listeners in order to develop a deeper relationship with them. But what does that mean strategically? It means we have to have a new strategy, one where “show prep” doesn’t mean a prep sheet or what we heard on another station, but instead starts with the listener and works backwards.

Traditionally we’ve built a target listener of some kind, and then we look for things that will interest them for content. Unfortunately most of the people doing this aren’t in the target, so they begin filtering what they think the target will want to hear. We’re trying to relate, but we’ve avoided the most important step – asking the listeners what they’re interested in.

Interesting, isn’t it? We rightly spend money on perceptual research, or at least we used to, and we spend money on music research to know their favorite songs. But we spend almost no time or money finding out about the person that is the listener. We’re still relatively shallow in our understanding of what the listener is actually interested in, so it’s difficult to connect with them.

How is your air staff handling show prep? How do they understand the listener enough to connect? Or is it just business as usual, with USA Today and some prep sheet from somewhere else, keeping up a wall between you and your listeners?

The Great Jock Strap Giveaway

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” – Oscar Wilde

It was an interesting session at the Gospel Music Association last week, where Christian broadcasters from around the world had gathered for their annual convention. Author Jon Spoelstra, in leading a session on marketing outrageously, was talking about the need to examine ideas before we shoot them down. Not that it would ever happen in radio, right?

While he was GM of the New Jersey Nets, someone through out the idea of giving away jock straps with a player name on the back. Even I have to admit it sounded like the kind of idea that I’d pretty much reject. But as Jon says, it’s important to look at everything, especially the ones that we’re ready to reject out of hand. The world is full of naysayers, people ready to tell you why an idea won’t work.

We are pretty skilled at that in radio. Maybe we don’t say it’s a terrible idea, but we have lots of other ways of making it known. Like, “Where’s that being one right now?” for example. We’re much better a copying someone else’s idea than we are looking at our own. Which is a shame, because, as Jon pointed out, everyone has good ideas some of the time.

The challenge with accepting or at least looking at new ideas is that it goes against two facts we all seem to share, the dislike of change and the fear of failure. You come up with a new idea somewhere and it’s going to cause change somewhere down the line, and there is that chance it just won’t work. Who wants to take that kind of chance in this consolidated world of downsizing?

The jock strap giveaway never came about, but mainly because of cost, not “sanity.” Our business depends on ideas at every level. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over, and we can’t simply copy others all the time. Sometimes we have to come up our own ideas, or at least be able to recognize good ideas from the people around us, but we can’t reject everything out of hand unless we want to accelerate failure.