One of our long-term clients is Bauer Media, working with their audio division on a number of radio brands. This can be everything from assessing how a brand is doing, to helping to turbocharge a new brand to take on more established competitors. Back in 2020, Bauer approached us to work on an insight project for their Greatest Hits Radio Brand. At this point, this was a very new product and the programming team wanted clear direction on listener wants and needs. We reached out to spend time with current listeners and target listeners, giving them listening tasks prior to our chats.
We wanted to understand their lives as much as their listening habits, what they did in their spare time, what brought them joy, as much as what pee’d them off. Through a mixture of qual and quant we built a picture of typical listeners, what they wanted to hear coming out of their speakers (music and chat), and how important music was in their lives. This all helped to generate a programming brief for on-air content and a marketing brief for how to attract and retain listeners.
Greatest Hits Radio has gone on to increase its audience by 31.4% in the last 12 months, reaching over 4.4 million listeners. (and all this is prior to the ‘Ken Bruce effect’, which will be covered in the next audience figures).