Branding and Public Radio

Jackie Huba, co-author of a great book called Creating Customer Evangelists told me about an excellent blog on branding. It’s called Brand Autopsy. Jackie thought I would be particularly interested in this week’s discussion which is public radio pledge drive dont’s. There is some great stuff here. The blog author, John Moore, and others who write in say that stations need to take a few tips from the Creating Customer Evangelists playbook. They need to gather more feedback so they can use that knowledge to craft more effective pitches that are targeted to their audience. They need to do a better job of leveraging the brand. And, they need to better communicate the positive benefits of going from listener to member rather than taking the “begging” approach. John Moore said “stop the guilt approach” but I brought up that a little guilt can work well for some people and mentioned the piece that Ira Glass did a few years ago where he made someone in front of Starbucks sweat. Moore agreed that guilt can work if it is done in a really creative way like Ira’s piece. He even got the audio from Ira’s excellent guilt piece and linked to it in his blog.

Beyond the public radio discussions on this blog, I enjoyed a lot of what I found here. There is a very funny discussion on “A Brand Called Omarosa.” If you are a fan of The Apprentice, you’ll love it. So, thanks Jackie for telling me about this blog. I’ll read it regularly.