Re-Positioning Radio
The Land of Strategy and Story Telling
Melissa Kunde, Executive Director of The Portland Area Radio Council interviews Jack Trout, Best Selling Author of Re-Positioning, and the Worlds For-most Marketing Strategist.
I’d like to Welcome Jack Trout. Tell us a little about your background.
I’ve been in this business a long time. Over the years I started at an advertising agency that gradually evolved into the land of strategy. I tried to differentiate “agency” in terms of the type of work we were doing and landed on the word “positioning.” That word positioning is now a gigantic word.
In the book, the word positioning was presented to differentiate your brand. In that book there was a chapter called re-positioning. In this time of change it was time for the twin to emerge. Repositioning in a world of competition, change and crisis.
Repositioning is how you adjust the perceptions in the mind. Positioning is establishing them and repositioning is adjusting them. The subject of adjusting perceptions is really very timely considering how the world has changed dramatically. That’s really how I got here today. In a way it’s the end of a pretty long journey into the land of communication.
Because we are in a new era, there are so many mediums that a business can choose from to create ROI, when someone is looking at an advertising mix, what’s important?
What’s important is to not get caught up in the hype of these new media forms. It turns out 90% of marketing dollars is going into traditional media. New media is a work in progress. It is still being figured out. The thing that I keep coming back to with marketers is that good marketing is good story telling. How do you tell your story in terms of positioning yourself or re-positioning yourself? There are not a lot of good story telling mediums out there.
Essentially the best story telling medium out there historically has been Radio. TV is too quick and limited to production cost. The beauty of radio is that you have 60 seconds to tell a story without spending a ton and it’s a medium that people spend time with. Radio is a very powerful story telling medium. The big brands of history were established on Radio without pictures. There is a myth that you need pictures to establish brand, but you really don’t. Most brands were established on Radio without pictures. It’s an unappreciated medium.
Recently I did a round table with agency owners and they said, “I don’t use radio because I can’t prove ROI with it and switched to TV.” What do you think about this?
That is rubbish. I feel that if you want to reposition Radio they need to reposition it as a primary medium not a secondary medium. It was THE primary medium and has already proved its value if you look at history. I don’t know what they are talking about with “no ROI.” First of all you have to do some decent research on awareness. You have to run an effective Radio program, and see how you have adjusted perceptions in the mind.
They say Radio is ubiquitous, and not accountable due to analytics.
What are television commercials? What are they? Are there analytics there? No. What’s happening in the real world is the commoditization of things. In category after category analytics are becoming commoditized. The question is how do you differentiate yourself? You need powerful differentiating ideas. Commoditization numbers are not doing an effective job of communicating. They are not telling the story of their brand. You’ve got to get on Radio to tell your story.
Products all look the same, but they don’t have to sound alike.
It’s recently been proven that sound is the most important human sense that drives behavior. Why don't companies use the power more? Especially since it has such an emotional and motivating driver?
The mind works by ear. Why don’t they do it, because they are all bias and bought into the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s not true. Elizabeth Loftus, who was studying the eye versus the ear, did an experiment it in the context of accidents. When you interviewed people on what they saw after a car accident she found out the eye is very deceptive. They were distracted and each visual account was different, but what they heard was the same.
The eye is very deceptive. Visuals are distracting. When they see something they stop listening. But when you hear something, that’s where the message is delivered. Since the message is delivered verbally, and driving ideas into people’s mind, there is not change of distraction. When people listen to it they’ll get it.
What do you think about putting radio together with a digital strategy?
Everybody wants to go online and drive traffic. SEO, direct response, etc.
I view online websites as brochures. In the old days we used to say call or write for a brochure. Today you say go online for more information. That’s your brochure. A website is an information brochure. If you want more information, that’s where you go.
Going back to story telling and sound, I looked up online the latest marketing trends for 2010. One said that branding doesn’t matter and you can build business online only. You just have to know where to put yourself. What’s your reaction to that?
Rubbish. I have a hard time with that. Sure certain products can build a market online, but it’s limited. How do people find you? Google is more like the yellow pages. People are already looking for something. That makes sense. It has become a gigantic yellow pages. We google it. So it’s funny things haven’t changed, they just get improved.
What your saying is that you are marketing to human beings and all you can do with broadcast is to use sight and sound. How are you going to create a story to illuminate a story? It's really about getting into someone’s mind.
(Jack agrees)
Do you think it’s a misconception that American’s want a million choices?
Yes. American’s are offered a million choices but the trouble is they can’t cope with a million choices. I mean it’s mind boggling. Last time I counted I think there were 200 different kinds of dog food; water globally there are 2000 brands floating around. Choice is becoming a problem. That’s the whole purpose of effective brand marketing is to separate yourself and get people a reason to go for you.
So what your saying is that you want to have the top five choices and we like to choose between a few. That’s how people live there lifestyle.
Essentially how do people store brands in their mind? Every category has a ladder in the mind and you want to be on the top ladder. But there are limited number of rungs on the ladder. You can’t remember more than 7 brand names and most don’t go to 7. Some categories have a few rungs, some have no rungs. Toothpaste are on high rungs. Caskets have no rungs, it’s a no interest category.
Two to three rungs. That’s the strategy. How do you get to be a one or a two or a three?
So what your saying is that in order to distinguish you have to stand out, you have to pick a medium that moves emotions, enables you tell a story, and be repetitive about it, and have the ability to enhance the story.
Exactly right. And to introduce new ideas to the story.
What do you think about sonic branding? Maintaing a song or voice through the consistency?
They are good memory devices. Anything that rhymes is a good memory device. Anything that has good alliteration is a good memory device. In a way that is what sonic branding is good for. It’s a quicker way into the mind. It sounds good and you can remember it easily, thats why you can do very well with Radio.
Marketing by ROI. Is that a recipe for success?
No. Look, ROI got born because a lot of CEO’s want to know why they are spending money on advertising? If their products are falling into commoditization they don't understand. The key is to differentiate themselves. People will pay a little more for benefits of differentials. How do you measure that? In terms of perceptions. You set up research to support how well you are getting into the minds of consumers. If you get yourself strong brands you can do well. That’s the kind of ROI I like to see. If you get yourself strong brands you will do okay. Everything else gets complicated.
If you could sum up for small business owners and agencies about radio and why they should consider it, what would you tell them?
#1 - Find out why you are different.
#2 - Figure out how to tell that story.
#3 - Find places where you can meet your customers and prospects and tell your story there. That’s it. Simple.
If you could have a room with all the radio presidents and say this what you need to do with the medium to make it rock and rock what would you tell them to do?
Reposition Radio as a primary medium and the reason you can do that is because of the power of sounds and you have to explain to people that sound is more powerful, even more powerful than pictures.