Set a day this fall to discover new station benefits and discover new listeners.
Make it a day of discovery.
How do you start? You need curiosity. Great radio stations never assume they know everything about their listeners. Audiences change. Communities change. Music tastes change. Morning routines change. And that promotion you’ve been running since the last ice age may not be as exciting as everyone in the programming meeting thinks.
Discover Your Audience Again
When was the last time you learned something new about your listeners? Don’t settle for Women 25–54 or Men 18–49. Those are demographic descriptions, not human beings.
Where do they work? What time do they get up? How long is their commute? What are they watching, streaming, buying, attending, and talking about? What local events matter to them? What makes them laugh? What frustrates them?
Better yet, talk to them. Interview your listeners. Conduct an informal Zoom group. Ask questions on social media. Talk with contest winners. Have your personalities spend time where listeners actually live, work, and play.
You may discover your audience isn’t exactly who you thought it was.
Discover Your Own Radio Station
Spend a day listening like a listener—not like a PD. Start with the morning show. Listen through stopsets. Sample middays and afternoons. Check nights. Listen to the stream and app.
What did you discover? Maybe a stopset feels endless. Perhaps the same promo plays too often. Maybe your personalities aren’t teasing ahead. Perhaps your station claims to be local but rarely mentions anything happening within 50 miles of the transmitter.
And here’s a particularly frightening discovery: Your listeners may not know half the things you think you’ve told them. If something is important, say it again. And again.
Discover Your Competition
Listen to your competitors for an hour—not to criticize them, but to learn. What are they doing well? What promotions sound exciting? How are they positioning their music? What are their personalities talking about? What can listeners get from them that they aren’t getting from you? The objective isn’t to copy the competition. It’s to discover an opportunity they haven’t claimed.
Discover Something You Can Own
Every successful station should have something distinctive: a benchmark feature, local service, music position, personality, contest, community commitment, or attitude that listeners associate with you.
If you disappeared tomorrow, what would listeners actually miss? That’s a tougher question than it sounds. Our goal is to create station attributes that competitors can’t easily duplicate.
The Lund Lesson
Discovery doesn’t require a research budget. It requires curiosity. The dangerous words in programming are “We already know that.” Maybe you do. Ask your staff to help analyze your station.
The Lund Challenge
Ask everyone on your programming team to discover one thing they didn’t know yesterday about your audience, your community, your competition, or your own station. Then meet the next morning and share the discoveries.
If five people discover five useful things, you’ve learned more about your station in 24 hours than some programming meetings accomplish in a month.
Keep exploring. Your next great programming idea may already be out there—you just haven’t discovered it yet.
Pic AI generated using Gemini.
John Lund is President of the Lund Media Group, a radio programming, broadcast consulting, and research firm with specialists in all mainstream radio formats.