Michael Harrison is the founder and publisher of Talkers Magazine, a trade industry publication related to talk radio in United States. It is referred to as “The Bible of Talk radio” since its inception (1990).Michael, a radio broadcasting innovator, is regarded as the most captivating and spirited personalities in the radio biz. Apart from being an editor, columnist, consultant, talk show host, producer and an owner of a radio station, Michael has been at the core of many of the most electrifying radio revolutions of the past 30+ years. Talkers Magazine serves the entire “talk media industry” including broadcast talk radio and television, cable news/talk television, as well as the new talk media delivered via the internet, podcasting and satellite radio.
Here’s an exclusive piece of conversation between Talk Radio Pioneer, and Founder ofTalkers Magazine. (Referred to as “The Bible of Talk Radio” by Business Week Magazine) and Marsha Friedman, CEO of Event Management Services, Inc.,(EMSI). Let’s delve into the insights and experiences shared by the radio maverick:
Marsha Friedman: Do you believe stations will eventually phase out guest interviews in favor of caller-driven shows?
Michael Harrison: No, I think the opposite: guest driven shows will be bigger than caller driven shows. Caller shows are already past their prime in terms of it being a novelty that people can call in. You know, in the early 90s we had this whole idea that talk radio was the electronic town hall of the nation; the people’s forum and their voice. There was something refreshing about that. But, in an era of everybody having their own website, their own blog, their Facebook and MySpace page, it’s no big deal anymore.
From our research, I find most people want to hear an interesting guest who is bringing new information to the table, rather than hearing what Joe in Brooklyn has to say about the same thing that Mary in Queens just commented on.
We’re going to see the guest format come back, but when it returns the guest will need to be a “new kind of guest”: one that is really schooled in the art of being a guest. The guest will need to be competitive with his or her subject and eloquent in their presentation because the competition for guests is going to get increasingly intense. Basically, if you aren’t good…you won’t get on.
Marsha: You mentioned the importance of being “schooled” at the art of being a guest and I honestly couldn’t agree with you more. But, in your expert opinion, why do you feel it’s so vital for talk radio guests to be trained before they are interviewed on the air?
Michael Harrison: When considering that we live in a sound bite society and suffer from a national epidemic of attention deficit disorder, you really have to know how to get your point across as quickly as possible, without any extraneous embellishment. And there is a tremendous art to that. Those who are able to master this art will be more effective in the 21st Century than those that don’t.
I know this is true because I do interviews on radio and TV as well with newspaper journalists all the time. One of the reasons they tend to use me a lot is because I’m able to answer their questions in one or two sentences when the camera is on or the microphone is open.
It’s important to train people in how to use the exposure that talk radio provides. First off, it’s your one shot on air to sell a book or product – so you have to be good. Secondly, the benefits of being a quality guest could make you into a “go-to person.”
With this status you could be asked to come back to that same station three, four, five times in the next 6 months even after you’re not selling your book anymore.
So you’re not only effectively selling your product, you’re selling yourself as a go-to guy to be added to their Rolodex. And being in the Rolodex of talk radio producers is the way to get the most benefit from having a good performance.
Marsha: Michael, what would you tell someone who is new to talk radio about the value it has in promoting a book, product or service?
Michael Harrison: Being a guest in the media, a talking head is a wonderful, wonderful way to get your message across. But it’s got to be timely. It’s got to be something that people want to hear about. It’s got to relate to the issues of the day, to the news of the minute.
I think that any organization which has an agenda they want to promote, a product they want to sell, an idea that they want to get across, or a profile they want to raise – they have to have talk radio and its cousins, meaning internet radio and cable news TV, in the mix.
It allows them to become part of the talk universe that the active consumer today is so plugged into.
Marsha: Speaking of active consumers, you do a research project every year about the demographics of the talk radio audience. What are your findings on the quality of the talk radio listening audience?
Michael Harrison: We have a feature on our website called the Talk Radio Research Project, and once a year we update it in terms of the breakdown of the audience, qualitatively. I strongly advise people to take a look at it because it’s highly detailed and there’s a lot of interesting statistics that we’ve uncovered over the years.
But, for the most part, I believe that talk radio audiences are the most active consumers of all things. They are the most likely people to have voted in the last election and to vote in the next election. They’re the most likely people to go and buy a book. They’re the most likely people to go out and even buy a record. They’re the most likely people to go see a movie. And, they’re the most likely people to buy products.
They listen to commercials more than people who listen to music radio. This has been borne out by research. The talk radio audience when compared to other mass media audiences are more likely to have been in college longer. They’re more affluent. They’re more educated. They’re the people you want to reach as they’re one of the best upper demographics.
So if you want to reach people 35+, you can’t go any place better than talk radio, either as an advertiser, or as a medium to promote your product. This is a very desirable market for any business.
Marsha: That’s so true. Finally Michael, in your opinion, does the number of listeners really have a direct impact on the amount of sales opportunities an interview can generate?
Michael Harrison: First off, it’s almost impossible to rate radio stations. So if anybody wants to know how many people are listening, they are going to be told a distortion or inaccuracy. The answer is nobody knows.
If you are new to the talk radio game, don’t get hung up on how many people are listening. If you have 10 listeners and all 10 buy your book or products that day, you’ve done a good job. Just go out there and do it.
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So that was such a sage advice from someone who has been involved in marketing and PR for too many years. As Michael mentioned so clearly, radio listeners are a quality demographic. And, it’s a perfect fit for a wide range of consumer and business topics, because of its very nature. In addition to general interest shows, you have a variety of specialized shows ranging from politics, finance, business, health, fitness and food – with a great many of these shows looking for expert guests.
So for all these reasons, Michael suggests, a talk radio campaign, with all the right elements in place, should be one of the most important items in your marketing strategy!
Thanks Marsha Friedman via
Here’s the third installment of the enlightening interview of marketing expert and best-selling author, Al Ries taken by Marsha Friedman, CEO of EMSI. Al’s insights are very enlightening and profound. I hope you found them enlightening as well. For those of you who have not read Part 1 &2 of the Interview and may not be familiar with Al Ries here are the links part1, part2.
Marsha Friedman: We have covered so much information, Al, and it’s all been so good. I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I have two questions I want to make sure I ask. First, what are your thoughts about marketing today, as compared to the seventies and eighties when we didn’t have things like the Internet, social networking, social media marketing, blogging, etc.? How has it changed marketing and do you think it’s better?
Al Ries: Well the Internet is a new medium and we don’t get very many new media. Before the Internet, the previous “new” medium was television. So over a course of history, you can see that “new” mediums took a long time to develop. First there was the printing press created by Gutenberg several centuries ago, which gave us the printed book and the periodical (which includes both newspapers and magazines). Then several hundred years later, we got radio and finally television, and now we have the Internet.
Every medium changes society. One may ask, “What is the key consequence of the Internet?” It’s the first global medium. You see, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books…they all are basically national. We have books published in Germany, Spain and many different countries. But each of those editions is published by different people in different forms and unique to those various countries.
A book is not a global medium like the Internet. Every day of the week with the Internet we correspond with people in China and in countries around the world.
In Marshall McLuhan’s terms, “the medium is the message.” So, what is the message of the Internet? What are the social consequences of this medium? The social consequences are the homogenization of the world. Wherever you go in the world today, you see the same brands. It’s incredible. My wife and I were walking on the Great Wall of China and my wife said, “Let’s stop for a Gatorade.” Sure enough, they had Gatorade. This is China, right? Another example, I got an e-mail this morning from our associate in Vienna. He asked me, “What’s this Excelsior Jewelry being sold by Steven somebody or other in Los Angeles?” I said, “I never heard of this.” He said, “Oh, they’ve got stores around the corner of…” I think to myself, “Wait a minute!” I am closer than he is and yet HE is more familiar with it, because of the Internet.
I do a monthly article for two publications in China. They send me some questions and the latest question is, “We’re interested in the Disney brand, etc., etc.” So, again, the social consequences of the Internet, the homogenization of the globe, is that we’re becoming a monolithic society. More and more, everything around the world is the same. Eighty percent of Coca Cola’s profits are from outside the United States.
Interestingly enough, here is the really meaningful idea when it comes to marketing. To explain this, let me give you an analogy. If you lived in a small town of just one hundred people, how many stores would you find? Probably one. And, what would that store sell? Probably everything. I mean food, clothing, boots, shoes…everything people needed in general, hence the general store. Boom!
You move to a big city where there are millions of people and what do you find? You find specialty stores. Not just clothing stores, but women’s clothing stores, children’s clothing stores, men’s clothing stores, dry cleaners and super markets. The principle is this, the greater the market, the bigger the city, the more specialized the brands have to become. The implication or the consequence of the Internet, the message of the Internet is as we become more and more of a monolithic world, the brands will have to become more narrow, more focused to stand for something locally. And that’s going to be a challenge.
Everyone wants to be what I call a monolithic brand, a brand that tries to have a full line of products and services for everybody. It’s just not going to work. Why? Because as more and more companies compete in a single market, each one of those competing companies has to be more narrowly focused.
In America, for example, we got locked into Microsoft, whose initial focus was on personal computer software. If you lived in Guatemala, where there are only three million people, could you start a company to just do personal computer software and grow like a Microsoft? I don’t think so. Invariably in a big country like America, we have companies that you couldn’t possibly start in a smaller country. Why? Because the smaller the market, the broader you need to be and the bigger the market the more narrow you have to be. As we become global, the logic is, “I’m going to sell my products around the world, so I have to have a broader line, because there are a lot of different people around the world.” That’s the logic. That’s not practical marketing. If you’re going to sell globally, we have to have a narrower line.
We work with a lot of companies in smaller countries and I can tell you that a typical company in a small country is very different than a typical company in America. A company there can be in food and banking and automobiles and all sorts of stuff. That would never work in America.
In Finland, a country of five million people, they have a company whose product line is narrow. The company is Nokia and their products are sold around the world. Why? Because Finland is too small, so to build a big company in Finland, Nokia had to think globally. We don’t sometimes think globally because America is big enough that you can produce a pretty big company if you just sold to Americans. But you’d better be thinking globally, because if you don’t, somebody will come into America with their global brand (like IKEA for example) and they’ll take your business away. So globalization is the idea that has really, really been driven by the Internet.
Marsha Friedman: What a different world today. Amazing! I would be remiss, being that I am in the PR business, if I didn’t ask you about your book, The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR. I could quote you forever from the book, because it really is an important message that businesses need to hear. Could you just comment, because I’d love to have it coming directly from you, as to why PR is so crucial in establishing a brand and planting the seed?
Al Ries: The issues here have to do with credibility. In other words, the average ad has little credibility. And there are lots of reasons for that. One of which is there is too much advertising. As a result, the average person doesn’t necessarily believe much of what he or she reads in the ads. That’s no problem if you have a strong brand. In other words, Rolex can run ads and people will believe it because they know Rolex, they know it’s famous and they know it’s one of the most powerful brands in the world. Their friends and neighbors brag when they buy one. But when they see an ad for a brand they’ve never heard of, their tendency is not to believe a single thing they read. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of research that says most people won’t even look at an ad for a brand that they’ve never heard of on the basis that, “If I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be any good.”
Marsha Friedman: That makes a lot of sense.
Al Ries: So advertising, more and more, is not good for the new brands. What’s good for new brands? PR. You see, in PR you’re not speaking for the brand, it’s the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or CBS, NBC or ABC who says it’s terrific. So the third-party endorsement through PR is the way to launch a new brand. Now that goes exactly against the thinking of management in America. Anytime anybody says, “Let’s launch a new brand,” management says, “We can’t afford to spend $20 or $30 million on an advertising campaign.” And we will say, “You’re right. You shouldn’t be doing that anyhow. You should be launching with PR.” Our philosophy is PR first and advertising second. You only use advertising after the brand has become established.
I’m not saying that established brands shouldn’t do PR; sure they should. But believe me, there is such an opportunity in the PR business to launch brands. As you probably know from your own experience, in meetings to launch a brand—and I’ve been in many of those and looked around—there are no PR people. The ad agency is there, the marketing manager is there, the sales manager is there and I ask, “Where are the PR people?”
So the PR business has a long way to go. First, they’ve got to get in the room. They’ve got to find a way to break down the door to get in the room before the brand is launched. That’s an issue too, but the philosophy I recommend is very powerful: PR first, advertising second.
And the other implication of this is the PR people need to get involved in the strategy of the brand. That’s the biggest single hang up, because traditionally it’s the advertising agency that works with the client to develop the marketing strategy—the “ultimate driving machine” words—and not the PR agency. But, the PR agency should, in a sense, take over the brand launching part of it and work on how to verbalize and visualize the brand. I think more PR people should be interested in reading our books than advertising or marketing people because some very major companies could buy into the concept of PR first and advertising second.
It would create enormous business for PRs, but more importantly it would make the function more important for the company. And nothing is as powerful in a company today, as a successful launch of a new brand. A new brand can double their business. The opportunity for a company’s expansion in many ways lies in the development of new brands.
A number of years ago when Apple came out, Richard Edelman, President and CEO of the world’s largest independent public relations firm, used to make speeches on this subject and Edelman’s business has gone through the roof. I can’t believe how large they’ve grown in the last ten years. There is an enormous potential in the PR business if you just do exactly what I’m talking about: establish the idea that the PR people should be the ones that are the outside consultants launching a new brand and not the advertising agencies.
Marsha Friedman: To your point about no PR people in that Board meeting discussing a brand launch; my experience is that there’s often a big misunderstanding by management as to the actual function of PR, and for that reason, gets overlooked for its importance and value to the company.
Al Ries: Yes, but this is not a one-sided thing. I think many in the PR industry don’t want to be responsible for the success or failure of a brand so they don’t really want to step out and say, “Hey, you should let us handle it.” They would sometimes rather say, “Send us the ads and we’ll publicize the ads.” That’s easy way out, right?
Marsha Friedman: Yes, that’s true. I’d like to ask you something else that just came to mind based on everything you just said about launching a brand with PR. Since you are engaging the public, then what the brand stands for may change, based on the response from the people. I was thinking about a Clear Channel radio station here in the Tampa Bay area that had a caller who said their Christian radio station was “life changing radio.” Ever since, Clear Channel grabbed that and now it’s their slogan. So, if PR is used effectively, the public may tell you how best to position your product to speak to them?
Al Ries: Exactly. That’s exactly it. When you launch a brand with PR, the idea that you’re going to live with forever isn’t necessarily in the PR release. It’s usually in what the magazine or the newspapers or the consumers wind up saying about the brand. So always keep your ear to the ground and when you hear something that’s good, you jump on it. But that’s the thing that companies don’t like, because they want control of the message. And, when you launch a brand with PR, in a way, you leave control of the message in the hands of the media and public, and corporations don’t like that.
We once worked for a company, that is out of business now, but their product was prepared foods. They hired us as consultants after they were in business a couple of years and after we looked over their material, we noticed there was a headline in one of the big magazines that said, “The Joy of Not Cooking.” And, we said, “Terrific, here’s what we want you to do. You see that sign out there with your company name? Well underneath that we want you to put a big sign that says “The Joy of Not Cooking.” It’s a consumer oriented idea and those words were the “ultimate driving machine” for them.
Do you think we were able to sell that idea? No. Instead they wanted to talk about the opposite: the joy of cooking and the experience of their 12 chefs.
Marsha Friedman: And, that gets to your point about the brilliant marketer being the one who is able to put himself in the mind of the prospective customer.
Al Ries: Yes, it’s all in the mind of the consumer. You are taking a chance when you launch a PR campaign as you can’t control the message. From many companies’ point of view, they hate that part. They want total control of the message and they want to hammer an idea to the consumer. I mean, look at some of the messages out there. I don’t know if you’ve seen Chevrolet’s latest advertising message: Chevy runs deep.
Marsha Friedman: Okay, I have no idea what that means.
Al Ries: Well, what you see is an old fashioned photo and typography. In a sense, what they are trying to say is, “Look at the heritage of the Chevrolet brand; it’s been around forever.”
Marsha Friedman: I see…
Al Ries: Chevy runs deep. Again, in our terminology you’ve got to bring the message down to earth. If we’re selling tractors, “runs deep” is great. But not SUV’s or cars. You don’t want to paint a picture that the darn thing is in the ditch.
Marsha Friedman: Great point. Al, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share with us your nuggets of wisdom, so that our readers can be enriched and, hopefully, their businesses grow.
Al Ries: Thank you for calling Marsha. It’s been nice talking to you and answering your questions.
Reflective insight from Al Ries, once again. We hope the information shared throughout these three segments has indeed been thoughtful and profound.We also wish that Al’s insightful and thought provoking ideas must have given you some nuggets of marketing wisdom which will be helpful to the success of your business.
Thanks Marsha Friedman via
We continue with Part 2 of the insightful Interview. Let’s take another dive into the interesting conversation to gain more of Al’s nuggets of marketing wisdom. For those of you who have not read Part 1 of the Interview and may not be familiar with Al Ries here is the link.
Marsha Friedman: Every business person obviously wants to have success. Their long term goals are to be very profitable and growing. However, when the doors need to stay open now, it’s hard to worry about 2 to 5 years from now. What are some of the things one needs to be aware of so that good decisions are made that will support all of their goals?
Al Ries: Short term needs and long term goals can sometimes conflict, and the most important advice I can give in this situation is don’t forget your focus. When it comes to focus, one needs to narrow it, not widen it. My company, Ries & Ries, works with clients all the time looking for ways to narrow their focus and get them out of offering too much stuff. However, many businesses aren’t keen on the idea, because when one narrows their focus they have to drop some product. So what happens in the short term? When you drop a product or service, you’re going to lose some business initially. Who wants to do that? To the average business owner, the thought is “Wait a second, we can’t do that!”
I’ll give you an example. My company was doing some consulting for Burger King. Now, Burger King has twelve hamburgers on their menu. We said to them, “That’s too confusing. Let’s reduce it.” Their reply was, “Oh! We can’t do that.” You see, they know the percentage of sales each one of those 12 products brings in, right? So they think, “If we make it five products, it means we’re going to lose 3.7% of the business.” They look at the numbers and what will happen in the short term, but they don’t look at the long term implication. The implication is when you simplify your product line, you make it easier for consumers to know what you’re selling and you’ll sell more, but not necessarily in the short term.
So “focus” is a long-term concept that can eliminate the short term issues, but you need to start for it to work.
The result of focus is the more you focus the stronger your brand becomes, because you can stand for something. For example, what’s a Chevrolet? I know what a Chevrolet is: it’s a large or small, cheap or expensive, car or truck. If somebody says to you, “I bought a Chevrolet,” not much was said. Did he or she buy a ZR1 for $105,000 or a sub-compact for $13,000? There’s a big difference there. So to say, “I bought a Chevrolet” is saying nothing, because the brand doesn’t stand for anything!
Many, many, many brands today do not stand for anything, because they’re into everything. If you’re into everything, the brand can’t possibly stand for a single thing. Yet what’s the trend in business today? Expand the brand. Why? Because it makes sense! “Well, we want to grow,” they say. “So if you expand the product lineup, you’re going to grow.” That’s logical. But it doesn’t work and that’s the most important thing about marketing. Every single principle of marketing is not necessarily logical and it makes it a very difficult discipline to learn, because almost everything you should be doing doesn’t necessarily make sense, if you look at it from the obvious point of view.
Marsha Friedman: I agree. In the focus section of your book, you also talk about the importance of focusing on one word, phrase or benefit.
Al Ries: Yes and that is where it becomes more important in the long term. Look at brands that have become very, very successful. Invariably they stand for something. Rolex stands for “expensive watch.” My company used to do some telephone interviews and we’d say, “Okay, we’re going to say a brand name and you tell us the first word that comes to your mind.” The highest score ever was Rolex and the word was “expensive.” From a management standpoint you might think that’s not a good word. Let me tell you, that’s a POWERFUL word! That’s what makes the Rolex brand. People buy a Rolex BECAUSE it’s expensive.
Marsha Friedman: You’re correct, it’s a status symbol.
Al Ries: That’s why they don’t buy a Rolex in spite of being expensive, they buy it to show off their success. If Rolex were to sell $1,000 watches, after a while, the brand would be destroyed because it’s not what the brand stands for. It stands for expensive watch in the same sense that Starbucks stands for expensive coffee.
Before Starbucks, if you asked somebody, “What’s a brand name of expensive coffee?” They wouldn’t know. That’s opportunity and yet if you’d have told somebody years ago, “Hey, let’s launch a chain of expensive coffee.” people would ask, “Why would you want to do that?” I mean, who wants to spend more money on coffee? Nobody!
Marsha Friedman: Let me ask you this, Al, and I preface my question by saying I totally agree with the focus concept. But what would you say about companies like, Home Depot? Home Depot’s focus is “Home Improvement,” but they have thousands of brands and products. So how does that work?
Al Ries: Well, to make my point, let’s take Wal-Mart for example. Wal-Mart has more than 150,000 products. But you see, once again, the Wal-Mart brand is built on one word. What is the word? It’s the word, “cheap.” If people want something cheap, they go to Wal-Mart. Now that doesn’t appeal to everybody, does it? No. But “cheap” is a very, very powerful brand provided you’re perceived as the cheapest. K-Mart went bankrupt. Why? Because they tried to emulate Wal-Mart’s strategy, but the consumer saw Wal-Mart as the first cheap store and therefore they own the word “cheap.” Now Target was smart. They said, “Hey, we can’t own ‘cheap’ because Wal-Mart owns it, so we’ll go a little upscale.” There’s a cliché about Target; they’re called Targét (pronounced TAR-ZHAY). Oprah Winfrey said Target was Cheap Chic. It’s a little better design and Target has done well; K-Mart has not.
The same goes for Home Depot. Home Depot was the first home improvement store. Whatever that meant, but to the average person it meant that if you have a project to do, you could go to Home Depot and get everything you need to complete the project (lumber, faucets, nails… you name it). Home Depot is a little like Wal-Mart. They not only sell you the whole package, but they sell it at a very good price. So in a sense, Home Depot is the Wal-Mart for men. For doing projects on Saturdays you go to Home Depot.
Marsha Friedman: So then, if a company says, “Okay, we’ve got a brilliant idea and we know that this is a money-maker. We want to release it.” How would you suggest they release it if you’re saying stay focused on what you have, don’t widen your focus, don’t lose your focus and don’t water down your brand? How would they do it?
Al Ries: Let’s look at Crest. Crest, the first cavity fighting toothpaste on the market. What is Crest today? Well it’s a mouthwash, white strips, electronic toothbrushes, etc; it’s all sorts of stuff. In my opinion, I don’t think that works as well as if they had separate brands for each of these categories. A separate brand for mouthwash, a separate brand for white strips (the teeth whitening stuff) and so forth. But the tendency on the part of many companies, and it’s because it makes sense to them from an economic standpoint, they think, “If we have one brand name and all these products are under one brand name umbrella, we’ll save money on advertising.” It is better to start a new brand and not mess with the established one.
Thanks Marsha Friedman via