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The More You Listen, the More You Hear
June 2, 2014
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. B. F. Skinner is the name that comes to mind when discussing operant conditioning - usually rats in a box or a maze. In perhaps the most famous Skinner experiment, a rat in a box would press a lever or button - by accident or chance - and be delivered a food pellet. Once the rat had that experience, it would usually continue pressing the lever or button until it wasn't hungry any longer. Among the goals radio programmers have adopted in the PPM world is to get consumers to keep coming back to their station. We've learned that multiple occasions build TSL (or ATE). So, repeat occasions are a goal. To stretch the analogy, we want our consumers to continue pressing the button for one of our stations.
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B. F. Skinner is the name that comes to mind when discussing operant conditioning – usually rats in a box or a maze. In perhaps the most famous Skinner experiment, a rat in a box would press a lever or button – by accident or chance – and be delivered a food pellet. Once the rat had that experience, it would usually continue pressing the lever or button until it wasn’t hungry any longer.Â
Among the goals radio programmers have adopted in the PPM world is to get consumers to keep coming back to their station. We’ve learned that multiple occasions build TSL (or ATE). So, repeat occasions are a goal. To stretch the analogy, we want our consumers to continue pressing the button for one of our stations.Â
When you ask consumers what they want from radio stations, they get analytical and tell us things like “lots of uninterrupted music” and “a wide variety of music” and the like. And while that’s the logical answer to the question, the deeper and broader response is often to feel better…to improve their mood…to pass the time more pleasantly.Â
In our NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study we asked respondents “When was the last time the radio make you smile?” As the number of daily occasions for respondents goes up, we observe that so does the likelihood they’ll say the radio made them smile within the last day. As the number of daily occasions goes down, we observe that many have to reach back a month or more to remember when the radio made them smile.Â
You can argue that those who tune in only once or twice a day have fewer opportunities for radio to make them smile. But, shouldn’t making people smile be a goal for much of our programming nearly all of the time?Â
So, besides playing the most-appealing, best-testing music for your targeted audience, what can you do to make listeners smile? If it’s a contest, it could be that it’s fun to play and easy to enter. If it’s a piece of positioning, it could be that it ties into something your targeted listener had been thinking about already that day. If it’s something as utilitarian as traffic and weather, it could be that it mentions a place they know and love.Â
The goal needs to be to make everything on the station smile-inducing all the time. We need to do a better job striking an emotional chord for more listeners more often. In the words of the recently departed Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”Â
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