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100% failure rate: "I don't want you to take this wrong, but..." Well, I don't want you to take this wrong but your radio brands may be lost in the fog. The "fog of war" isn't just a timeless
Carl Von Clausewitz incantation; instead it's a condition of everyday business. We're all creatures of denial.
Let's suppose you and I are avid sailors in Portland, Maine. I have a 49 foot ketch that's capable of trans-Atlantic cruising. You suggest, "What say we do a crossing to England?" I respond in kind, "I'm for it. Meet you at the harbor with supplies on Saturday morning!" Days later we load our gear and as we cast-off, I casually mention "You have the course charted, right?" You reply, "No...I thought you knew the course." We stare at the boat, the harbor, and each other and I say, "What the hell, we'll just head straight East. We'll get there." Reckless? Absurd? Of course.
Every day of every year we face the daunting task of playing the Nielsen game. PPM or Diary, we know that our corporate existence depends on our ability to chart the course; except 80% of us own few navigational tools. We talk about our personalities, our content, our marketing. We look ahead at the metered households or in-tab projections which are descriptive but not at all predictive. We have few forensics beyond the last monthly or a PD Advantage package. We are in fact setting sail without way-points or Sat-Nav. We are not optimizing our potential. We are in harm's way.
Our firm has never once taken a research lead fee, received a Christmas gift, nor accepted anything beyond a casual "thanks" on the completion of helping coordinate a perceptual research project for a client. The outcome is reward enough based on triumphant experiences. Yet we also know the frustration of wondering why so many are reluctant to commission a $40,000 perceptual project with one of the four or five top-gun research firms when one lost Verizon buy in a medium market could easily ring-up four times that in lost revenue.
Speaking from personal experience, early in my career coming from the gunslinger mentality I was at best, skeptical about the payoff from "research." Then I spent 4 hours in a Bill Moyes war college at the Intercontinental in New Orleans. I came away a changed man and from there- forward have preached the doctrine of research as an MRI. It should be seen as a capital investment versus a line-item expense. From a credible perceptual project your cluster or specific brand uncovers: market landscape and format proclivities, the intricacies of your specific format, and the "satisfaction grades" you currently own, faced-off with those of your competitors. You find precise music genre coalitions for better cume-to-fan conversion. And you find out where your personalities score on the ladder of love versus like. These outcomes only scratch the surface and every perceptual format study in which we've been involved from Triple-A to Sports has been carefully customized with participation from management, programming, and our consulting team. There is no template for these projects and in the event you sense you're seeing one, scrap it and start over.
What are the hidden cost of spraying & praying regardless of market size or measurement model? Being perennially lost in the fog guarantees at the very least your brand will never reach its optimum; far worse, you may get pounded by an upstart competitor armed with real navigation. The old Fram Oil Filter branding campaign admonished, "Pay me now or pay me later." Anchors Aweigh.
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