Unlike this board, no one's telling P&G, "don't do any research, introduce whatever product you want"
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Before an idea can be tested, someone has to first come up with it. And then, it needs to be refined. Testing should be a process leading to improvement, but too often it's simply a pass/fail exercise. The fact is, almost any good idea can work if executed properly, and almost any good idea with fail if executed poorly. Too often in business, testing is nothing but a way for executives to engage in some CYA.
Radio programming is not commonly tested in advance of airing as movies, pilots and commercials often are. Radio is tested after a concept is created and aired for a while. There are a variety of perceptual testing methods used to judge the appeal of a format or show, including those that help to identify the high and low spots.
I've never seen radio perceptual research resulting in a pass / fail judgment. For that, we have Nielsen.
That's a rather broad, blanket statement. Each of us had been amazed at times by TV shows that get renewed when we wonder how they even got greenlighted. And we have been dismayed by seeing favorite shows canceled after short runs because they did not make it. In other words, even with concepts that test well and are well done, some just don't light up the viewers and some that seem rather crummy hit a sweet spot and achieve success.
No, actually, it seldom is that. It's intended to give guidance for product improvement. In some cases, the implementation of the research is faulty or management decides to ignore key parts of it, but that is not the fault of the research.
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FredLeonard
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Funny, you mention P&G. People here keep saying the CBS (or some other group owner) would NEVER flip station X to sports, news or whatever because they already have a station in the market with that format. P&G, on the other hand, has a long history of introducing new brands and products which compete directly with existing (sometimes dominant) products it already owns. If you're going to compete, compete with yourself. Two market shares are better than one. Money from both goes into the same corporate coffers.
Ex cathedra declarations are not the same as facts. While there are exceptions, market research in general is conducted to support a predetermined course of action, not to uncover consumer needs but to gauge what the organization conducting the research can get away with and how much more they can charge.
Ex cathedra declarations are not the same as facts. While there are exceptions, market research in general is conducted to support a predetermined course of action, not to uncover consumer needs but to gauge what the organization conducting the research can get away with and how much more they can charge.
Getting back to the title of this thread, I would love to see a national all news service . I loved NBC's News and Information Service. I was sorry to see i didn't succeed. During the day, outside of the markets that have all news stations, and there aren't that many, if you don't want music, it's the same old right wing rhetoric day after day and on the weekend, specialty shows and infomercials.
For example, we were driving in Pennsylvania when when my wife mentioned Robin Williams died. She found out while on facebook. I wanted to hear about it,but WCBS and KYW were coming in spotty, and I didn't want to wait for a top of the hour newscast. I switched on Mark Levin on WABC and the caller was talking about it. Next call..same old Obama bashing. With a national all news service, you could find a local affiliate and hear about it immediately.
However, I realize a national all news network is not going to happen. Even the latest incarnation, America;s News seems to be falling apart. When I visited South Florida, I found WWBA out of Tampa to be a nice alternative with an all news format during the day. They have since dropped the format.
For example, we were driving in Pennsylvania when when my wife mentioned Robin Williams died. She found out while on facebook. I wanted to hear about it,but WCBS and KYW were coming in spotty, and I didn't want to wait for a top of the hour newscast. I switched on Mark Levin on WABC and the caller was talking about it. Next call..same old Obama bashing. With a national all news service, you could find a local affiliate and hear about it immediately.
However, I realize a national all news network is not going to happen. Even the latest incarnation, America;s News seems to be falling apart. When I visited South Florida, I found WWBA out of Tampa to be a nice alternative with an all news format during the day. They have since dropped the format.
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If she was on Facebook while you were driving, if you couldn't find an OTA radio station with news, why didn't you just have your wife access a news report on the internet? The fact that it is so easy to access news immediately on the internet is what makes operators of OTA radio stations not want to attempt to compete with the internet.
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FredLeonard
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What's the difference between hearing a station via a rusty tower or an audio stream?
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I can understand that. I can even relate to it. Sadly, there just aren't enough of us who want that all the time to make OTA radio broadcasts of all news, all the time commercially viable. Personally, I never listened to news radio as my standard radio entertainment, but I liked the idea of tuning in on those rare occasions when there was something important breaking. All news stations can't survive on only being tuned in when something big happens.
The radio station won't get turned off if you go over your data cap? The radio station works in places where there aren't cell phone signals?
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I lived in Pennsylvania for 57 years. I'm familiar with bad reception for electronic media, including digital phone, wireless internet, and radio stations. And, I know what it's like to have a wife who doesn't want to change what she's listening to over to what I want to listen to. But what really matters is that fact that the even though there are some of us who like the idea of a radio news station perpetually on stand-by for those rare moments when we're interested in a breaking story, such a station cannot stay in business if the rest of the time, when there is no big breaking news story, very, very few people want to tune it in.
That's untrue. Research is done to find out what people feel or do.
Do they use my brand of toothpaste? Why? Do they use a competitor's brand and why? Do they like my package? My flavor? The price? What do people feel about my brand? Does using it make them feel they made a good decision?
The toothpaste brand can then spot marketing opportunities, ranging from tweaking the flavor to adding an additional flavor, or dealing with perceptions that are negative, such as "it's my parents' brand".
Most research is done to have empirical data before decisions that affect the future are taken... which is the opposite of what you say.
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FredLeonard
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Absolutely, CNN has learned that lesson the hard way.
What's sad is all news radio and public radio don't really give people are reason to keep listening when crisis, tragedy or war is not occurring. Maybe part of the reason is there is so little actual reporting in radio news. Now they call it "enterprise reporting" but whatever it's called, it's hardly ever heard. Instead, like TV, all news stations go do stand-ups from where nothing is happening at the time reading wire copy or head for diners or train stations to do man on the street interviews. But no digging up dirt. No exposing scandals or corruption. No finding out things "they" don't want you to know. All so predictable and non-essential. Just staged events and press releases passed off as news.
Then again, continuous muckraking isn't necessarily a ratings bonanza. There is a point of exhaustion in all this, and we see it in the right wing talk area. You can only cry wolf so long before folks just shut the dang thing off.
Houston would be one of them. So Radio One flipped a gospel FM to all news, and hasn't broken a 2 share.
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Which comes back to a suggestion I made earlier in this thread. Instead of a "news" operation that's patterned after the front page of a newspaper, try a newsmagazine that includes a mix of news stories and features. I compared it to something like NBC radio's "Monitor", though another version might be a commercial version of NPR. I've been watching a lot of the infotainment channels on cable over the past few years. It seems like networks like the various offerings of Discovery, or A&E having carved out a successful niche by turning what used to be the bread & butter of public television into a more accessible, somewhat lower-brow commercial version.
Maybe audiences would respond to a commercial radio program that was to public radio what USA Today is to the New York Times.
Has anyone tried such a thing in the 21st century?
The problem is that NPR is getting older demos for it's news & feature magazines. Of course they don't care, because older demos are happy givers.
Bring back AM Stereo and the 15 Khz sound
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