‘Get closer to your customer’ is the simple marketing diktat being followed everywhere. And we have also often heard the line ‘get your customer to experience the brand’.

Consumer ‘interface’ choices seem to get demarcated into two clear territories: Media like print and TV which are largely one-way communication media; and ‘alternate avenues’ that are interactive and seem to bring the brand closer to its community. The problem that arises is that when you choose a ‘closer to community’ approach, the sheer number of people that you can influence seems to drop drastically. And brands take this as a given.

But should that be a given? Should a brand not be allowed to have its cake and eat it too?

Let’s take the example of using the Web as being at the core of the community building exercise. Let’s say company X has launched a web-based community programme for their FMCG brand targeting women. They did this to achieve the objective of building a long-term brand experience for women and build a community around ‘users/usage of the brand’. Let’s put in the obvious filters. How many people are connected to the Net? Of them how many are women? How many of them have gone beyond just email and basic information searching? Of them how many are women in your TG? Of them how many use your product? Of them how many are there in your priority markets? And how often can you dovetail this programme with activities that you are running on the ground? You’ll then witness that the diminished community size leads to the overall effect of the community programme diminishing substantially.

If a brand did a ground level BTL approach at the core of the community building exercise, the sheer time for planning and execution required to ‘physically reach’ diminishes the ‘here and now impact’ that one is looking for.

Now let’s look at taking FM radio at the core of this community building exercise. What do we have?
1. FM radio allows both the ‘interactive’ and ‘all-day live to listener’ element required to create an impactful and continuous community buzz.

2. Its cost efficiencies allow long-term monetary commitment to community building.
3. It allows large enough communities to interact with a brand as the overall audience figures for radio are so much higher.

It is therefore important for clients to look at a ‘long-term community building approach using radio at the core with a host of other activities surrounding it to get the maximum continuous community impact over a larger set of people.

Simple checklist
Before a brand chooses its radio partner for its brand community programme, a simple checklist would suffice:

1. Is the format of the radio station and its ideas flexible to build communities or are they ‘pre-designed’ for just running ‘spots for the masses’? If it is the latter, then that radio brand is behaving as a one-way medium and would not allow selection as a long-term brand community partner – it would be a short-term media opportunity.

2. Does the radio brand intensely target the same TG as your brand TG? In other words, if your brand wants to associate with and not just reach educated car owners or people who buy branded apparel, but the radio station brand also targets taxi-drivers and auto-rickshaw owners as part of their mass reach programme, then the ‘lack of right brand association’ would kill community impact. The C, D, E segments are huge in most mass radio players’ domains and your brand would be ‘paying extra’ for ‘forced reach and weakened brand association’.

3. Does the radio station brand truly understand your brand’s long-term marketing challenge? Or have you shared the same with your radio partner? And is it able to synergise long-term audience affinity building with your brand’s community interest idea and that too within a desired geographical footprint?

Let’s say your brand’s objective is a community building programme around upwardly mobile youth in eight metros. Is your brand being forced to look at ‘generic’ radio programmes meant for the lowest common denominator audience and that too with many non-metro stations thrown in from the radio brand’s footprint just because they happen to be there? Incremental reach at marginal cost does not build community affinity as it is over and above the purview of the metro community programme as defined above in the first place.

4. Does the radio brand offer a response-driven approach to make the whole community programme measurable on a day-to-day level and at a programme culmination level? How can the delivery of this response measurement be made credible?

5. Is the radio brand diverting attention to its own marketing and advertisement spends in other mediums as a measure of its ‘equity enjoyed within a particular community’ and offering to share this space with the brand? The point to note in ‘media brands’ is that communities build loyalties with content and certain ingredients of the medium itself, and not with its ‘publicity mechanism’. So, essentially the marketing/advertising spends of the radio brand outside its own medium would not in any way impact ‘community building’ and so are irrelevant to the selection.

Yes, it is possible for you to have your cake it and eat it too when you use radio at the core of your brand community building programme provided you choose your radio partner with the utmost care. It is therefore also possible to get quantity and quality both in your quest to get closer to your brand community.