Every station in your market has the same music, the same features, and the same information. Many even have the same prep service. The one that makes people feel something wins. There are six emotions worth aiming at. Here’s how to target them.
When two products have the same features, the one that appeals to an emotional need is chosen. That is an enormous opportunity, and it is the closest thing personality radio has to a holy grail. Put another way: If you’re not connecting with one of the paths to emotional radio, you’re a commodity. Commodities are nice. They’re essential. But ultimately, they’re replaceable.
At most stations, shows produce emotion the way a kitchen produces smoke. It’s a byproduct without a plan. This article is about doing it deliberately.
Proof: Emotion Outperforms Information
Start with the business case, because it is easier to accept a blunt truth when it’s applied to another industry or brand.
Research by Motista (as reported in the Harvard Business Review), found that customers with an emotional connection to a brand carry 306% higher lifetime value, stay with the brand an average of 5.1 years versus 3.4, and recommend it at nearly twice the rate (71% versus 45%).
Those numbers are worth remembering the next time somebody asks why a show should spend a few extra minutes on a story about a listener’s father.
But not every brand can do this. Everyone likes a good breakfast burrito, but almost nobody has an emotional connection to the grocery store that sold it to them, and no amount of clever merchandising changes that.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent years studying patients whose capacity for emotional processing had been damaged while their reasoning stayed intact. The expectation was cold, rational decision-making, but the study showed they became nearly unable to decide anything at all. They could list the options endlessly, but never choose.
Emotion makes a decision possible, which means a listener chooses a station because it feels right for them. Decisions are emotional, not logical.
There is a second benefit, too, which is especially important for a business measured in recall:
Emotionally charged events are remembered better than neutral ones.
That is why you can recall exactly where you were during a broadcast from fifteen years ago, but cannot name a single thing you heard yesterday. A show that generates feeling is more memorable.
The Safe Room
Consultant Jaye Albright framed the job about as well as it can be framed:
Entertainment means enabling another to experience feelings in a safe environment. Make a person laugh, make them cry, make them shake their fists in anger. You have committed entertainment.
The phrase “safe environment” is doing some heavy lifting.
Anger has consequences. Grief is exhausting. Fear is not entertainment. But audiences crave the feeling without the bill. They have a chance to be furious about something that will not cost them a friendship. They can cry about a stranger’s story and be fine by the end of the next commercial set. Your gift to them is to experience the pull of a memory without having to live in it. It’s an escape!
That is what a novel does. It is what a horror film does. It is what a country song has done for a hundred years.
Your show is a room where people can feel things at no cost. When you understand that, “should I do this emotional break” becomes a much easier question, and so does the follow-up question:
How far should I take it?
This is where most shows either flinch or overshoot.
Amusement Is The Problem
Most shows are amusing. They’re fine. They’re nice.
Amusement is a fine emotion, but it’s shallow, easy to produce, and it’s common. It’s a commodity.
Being mildly entertained is available everywhere, for free, on a device the listener is already holding, with few or no commercials. You have to be better than that.
Don’t believe it? Run the audit.
The Emotional Range Audit
Analyze one week of your own show. For every segment (not liners, weather, or a contest read), write down the one-word emotion you were aiming at. If you can’t identify one, don’t make it up.
Then count them.
Nearly every show that runs this exercise discovers that most are aimed at being “fun.” But that’s not an emotion, is it? Funny is, but that’s not as easy. You’ll probably find that most segments don’t target an identifiable emotion, and the remaining ones often happen by accident when something unexpected happens.
If that’s how your audit turns out, something needs to change. The six paths to emotional radio are your north star.
Forget What You’ve Learned (and Maybe Believed)
First, let’s start with this:
Forget what you learned in DJ school, PD school, and GM school. Formatics, liners, hot clocks and promos are essential, but perfect music rotations do not connect to emotion. Ten in a row will not convert a casual listener into a fan. Creating emotional moments requires evaluating performance through the ears of the audience rather than the checklist of the format, and it requires permission to break rules that were written for a different problem.
Adjust the objective. Emotional moments do not produce an immediate, traceable return. They cement a bond that pays off repeatedly over years, which is a genuinely difficult thing to defend in a quarterly meeting. And here is the trap: do not get more emotional in order to move ratings. Ratings follow when listeners are moved, but an audience can smell a ratings ploy from a considerable distance, and nothing kills a connection faster than the suspicion it was engineered.
Know the listener. You cannot aim at a feeling if you do not know what the person on the other end cares about, worries about, or has lived through. Armed with an understanding of the target listener’s interests, worldview and circumstances, appealing to their values stops being guesswork.
Oh, one more thing:
Take small risks first. Do not go all in on a Tuesday.
The Six Paths To Emotional Radio
Here are the six emotions, in order of how easy they are to reach. Each includes what it is, how to trigger it on the air, and what can go wrong.
