Consistency is Key

If you're a Content Director, at some stage in your career you've no doubt heard something similar to this, "There were some comments from the sales team in the meeting today that they are tired of the benchmark at 7:10". That slow rumble of noise begins as a passing comment in the corridor and slowly gets louder to the point where the GM or CEO says something to you in the weekly catch up and keeps bringing it up. You read the room and decide that despite there being no evidence in the research for making a change to a popular benchmark, to finally relent and make the change.

It's one of the frustrations a Content Director has to deal with. These suggestions are not malicious; they are just acting on feedback from the people inside the building or their own personal views have got the better of them but people in radio do not listen like people who are not in radio. People in radio listen a lot, and they listen in foreground mode all the time and most don't understand the principles of radio programming. Very few people do. If they did, they would know that radio runs on consistency.

Most people listen to radio while doing something else which means they're not sitting there fully focused on it. That means the station must be easy to choose and easy to stick with. Consistency does that because it builds habits and your brain likes knowing what's coming. When a station does the same kinds of things at roughly the same time (traffic, a regular benchmark, a familiar music feature in a certain part of the hour), it becomes predictable. You don't have to think about it. The time of day or the activity you're doing becomes a cue and you tune in almost without thinking. Over time it turns into a habit rather than something you actively choose. Unexpected changes that don't serve a purpose confuses, and the brain doesn't like confusion.

Voices, station positioning, and the overall sound that you've heard before are processed more quickly by the brain. That ease gets interpreted as preference and it simply feels more comfortable and appealing than something new and unfamiliar. When a station keeps changing its key benchmarks, features, structure or format, it forces extra mental effort at the exact moment people are already distracted. Hearing the same station sound and a consistent music approach over and over tends to make people like it more, especially when they're only half-listening (which is normal for radio). People often say they want something new, but in practice they keep choosing what's familiar. Consistency gives them that familiarity, so they don't have to relearn what the station is every day. When listening follows a regular pattern, people remember it better and they're more likely to come back to something they can easily recall than to something that changes. The same goes for announcers who are regular recognisable voices that people build a sense of connection with. Constant changes in who is on air or how the show is put together weaken that connection.

Of course, too much sameness eventually becomes boring, and too much unpredictability stops habits from forming. The stations that do well strike a balance between the two. The music foundation remains consistent as does the line up and the regular features the station has become famous for, so the audience knows what kind of station it is and when certain things will happen, but they vary how those things are executed. There is an old saying in radio "Be consistent with the music, be adventurous with the packaging.

A great example of consistency is Smooth 95.3 in Sydney. Since it launched in May 2012 the music foundation, while its evolved has remained essentially the same as has the line up and as a result it has been at or near the top of the FM ratings for over a decade. That consistency paid real dividends when its major competitor Gold 101.7 recently changed their breakfast and drive shows (and KIIS 1065 lost their #1FM Breakfast show) allowing Smooth to take a now dominant position as the #1 FM station in Sydney.

What happens when a station changes a successful breakfast show? Habitual listening is broken and the immediate behavioural response is to look at what else is available either on other stations or on other platforms. Some listeners leave permanently while others sample competitors and may return only if the new offering clearly outperforms the alternatives. P1 listeners (those that listen most of the time to a station) are the most likely to feel the loss personally and the least likely to adapt quickly. A well marketed change can produce a brief spike in sampling as people check out "what happening" however sustained listening usually falls. Audience recovery is rarely automatic and often takes many months or years and some stations never regain their previous ratings success. Even listeners who stay, tend to listen less often while familiarity is being established and this shows up as lower time spent listening in the ratings.

Sudden or poorly explained changes tend to produce the sharpest drops and the strongest negative reactions. Evolution without changing the core sound usually has a minimal effect on listening and retains more of the existing audience while still allowing improvement (tightening the music, refreshing the imaging, tweaking existing features, even replacing a secondary breakfast co-host etc). The stations that manage change successfully usually preserve enough of the familiar sound or structure that the new changes can be absorbed with minimal effect on habitual listening.

If you're measured by a diary based methodology as Australia is, where the diaries are now majority electronic, with a residual paper component and supplemented by streaming logs and a wearable panel, then consistency really matters because it's based on recall and diary keepers tend to reconstruct listening from remembered patterns. Diaries are filled in retrospectively rather than in real time and a dairy based methodology rewards consistency for several reasons. Recall favours stable patterns and people are better at reconstructing regular routines, and diary entries commonly show similar breakfast/daytime/drive listening patterns across weekdays rather than varied actual behaviour. A station that delivers consistent content is more likely to be remembered and recorded while sporadic or variable listening is under reported.

Diaries (and even e-diaries) require the respondent to correctly name or select the station and strong, consistent positioning with station ID or frequency association reduces the risk of attributing listening to the wrong station. Station branding and positioning that is delivered consistently and with frequency reduces confusion and aids recall and historical diary audits have shown repeatedly that changing branding or positioning (not the imaging or packaging) has a detrimental effect on recall.

Cumulative audience (cume/reach) depends on the number of people who record at least one quarter hour of listening. Consistent stations generate more cume across the week and in sample terms, higher cume improves the odds that the station appears in enough diaries to produce stable results. Time spent listening, the product of the number of quarter hours listened to during a daypart, day or week is helped by consistency as listeners return more often and stay longer when the experience matches expectation. The same mechanism operates where the methodology is based on metered systems (PPM or wearable), while meters capture passive exposure that diaries may miss, habits still drive the underlying behaviour the meters record.

Consistency works because it matches how people listen and how their mind works with how radio is measured. Consistency begins with the right strategy developed through market studies and other key pieces of research and once the strategy has been agreed then executing it consistently is the goal. When in doubt about anything, refer to the strategy for the answer. People who don't will make unnecessary changes for fear that listeners are getting bored but constant change stops habits from forming and makes the station harder to remember.

When a station keeps the same line up, the same kind of music, and the same features at the same times, listening becomes easy and automatic and most importantly people remember it and keep coming back. Even as measurement shifts toward meters and streaming data, the same mental processes still drive what people actually listen to. Different formats and age groups handle change differently, yet the basic advantage of being consistent remains the same: lower effort, stronger recall, and better results. If you want to be successful you need to be consistent and if you're not then people will leave and it's harder to get them back when they do, which is frustrating because they were there in the first place.

About the author

Duncan Campbell was Chief Content Officer at ARN Australia for 15 years. Before that he worked in senior programming roles at Austereo, Bauer Media, GCap and GWR. He now consults to radio and audio companies through CD Media.