Dare To Be Different

There's something to be said for consistency. Consistency, on the other hand, can be a trap. Take Wheaties.

Wheaties? Yeah, think about Wheaties for a moment. At one time, and for a very long time, Wheaties were a reliable breakfast staple. It was one of the top cereals, a household word, heavily advertised, beloved. Athletes couldn't claim to be real superstars until they made it onto the Wheaties box. You ate sugary cereals as a kid while your parents tried to get you to eat Wheaties, and then you became a parent trying to get your kids to eat Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions.

Anybody still eating Wheaties?

In fairness, some people do. It's still in the grocery, but you wouldn't notice, because it tends to be buried while other brands take up most of the shelf space. Sales have plummeted. There's nothing particularly wrong with Wheaties, and they pretty much taste the way they tasted when you were a kid, but here we are, 99 years into the History of Wheaties, and it's gone from a dominant brand to an afterthought. Meanwhile, cereal itself isn't as automatic a breakfast choice as it used to be -- people are more health-conscious, or they'd rather grab a breakfast burrito on the go -- but if anyone is going to eat cereal, they're probably going to go for either something more Cinnamon Toast Crunch-y or something from the Organic Healthy-Seeming Cereals That Taste Like Cardboard section. Wheaties are yesterday's food.

How did that happen? For one thing, American tastes changed. For another, there are a lot more breakfast choices. Habits changed -- America stopped sitting at the breakfast table before commuting and started hitting up the Starbucks or Dunkin' drive-thru for a coffee and something baked. They stopped aggressively marketing the brand. But another element is stagnation. Wheaties didn't change. The box didn't change. The flavor didn't change. And when tastes changed, the consumers chose other options. There are, in truth, a few newer variations on Wheaties in the stores, but it was all too little, too late. Wheaties will endure, somehow, but it won't be what it once was.

Sound familiar?

Commercial broadcast radio is pretty much what it was decades ago. Mostly the same formats, same DJ patter, same contests and promotions. Talk radio is the same, and most of the changes have involved younger hosts saying the same things as the older hosts they replaced. Marketing is weak or nonexistent. And there are tons of other options available. Radio is a lot like Wheaties -- once huge, still alive, no longer as popular.

Not that podcasting is exempt from this. It's been a while since anything really new or remarkable has come along; I'm finding it more difficult to tell all the true crime podcasts apart, or the reality show personality-hosted shows, or the TV recap shows, or the daily news podcasts.

Which leads us to the need for something different. You want to break through and grow your audience? Do something different. There will always be some market for what's been done before -- consistency, comfort food, reliability. There will always be an audience for "the best variety of the (insert past decades here) and today," and there's going to be an audience for angry guys yelling about politics. But there's a larger audience waiting for something new. What, exactly? We don't know. And neither do they, which is the point. You won't find the next truly different hit in any medium through research, because people don't know they want something before it exists.

Familiar is good. Familiar, in some respects, is a necessity -- you're not going to program a music station loading up with unfamiliar music unless you don't want to attract a large audience. But as the audience changes, what you offer is ultimately going to have to change, too. You can keep feeding people the familiar, but you should also start looking for things that break the mold, because that's how you grow. The next breakout hit isn't going to sound exactly like what came before it, on the radio or in podcasting, just as sticking Wheaties in a new box isn't going to turn it into the Next Big Food Trend.

Radio's aversion to things that are different has to change for the long term. There will be failures along the way, but it's rare that you get real success on the first try. It's worth the effort, whether you own a station or podcast network or you're just someone with a laptop and mic and podcast hosting account. Do you want to be someone who does the same old thing in a shrinking business, or someone who breaks out of the mold and builds something bigger?

Let's see what you got.

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If you're going to do something different, you'll find material to help you do that at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page. Click here for that, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Mastodon @pmsimon@c.im