If you know anything about Apple and their awesome company, we can all agree that Steve Jobs is brilliant. I don’t need to ramble off all of the stats and talk about all of their products. The guy has done amazing things with that company. I came across a quote from him recently that kinda blew my mind.
In the New York Times article here, a reporter asked Jobs what consumer or market research Apple had done to guide the development of the first iPad. His response:
“None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.” - Steve Jobs
Here’s a question for my radio friends in light of that quote. Do you think he’s wrong? If not, do you think that logic is true of music…that it’s not your consumer’s job to know what they want from you? What if you could build so much loyalty to your brand that you could do no wrong? You set the trend. You tell them what is cool. They love it because they trust you and love what you put out to them.
So what keeps anyone from actually operating like that? Fear, I suppose. “If we stop seeing those research scores we won’t know what the perfect 39-year-old mother of 3 thinks and she’ll stop listening and ratings will go down and giving will go down and I’ll lose my job!” Hardly. You know as well as I know that they’re not gonna stop listening because they didn’t like a few songs. They stop listening now. What you end up with is a station that’s by definition, safe. Safe = free from harm or risk (according to merriam-webster).
I wonder what would happen if that same logic that was applied at Apple was applied at your radio station…would you have just as many “hits”? Could you sustain or grow your audience without your music research? Like, if you actually trusted your music director to direct the music and pick the songs that hit the core of what matters to the audience? A singable hook, music that made people feel something, lyrics that represent Biblical truth and made the listener feel like the song was meant for them, etc.
Do you really know what the audience wants and expects? Does that matter?
If you know me, you know that I’m passionate about music and about radio. This quote really jumped out at me and made me think. What if he’s correct? Would it, should it, change how you do things?
