The Infinite Dial

Some years ago I was doing focus groups in Chicago for a radio station and discovered that we were sharing the facility that night with the marketing team for a major adult beverage company. It turns out that they were testing a new alcoholic beverage (professional courtesy prevents me from revealing more) and were gauging reactions to the taste, packaging and messaging. What impressed me at the time was the fact that they were bringing in what was, by all appearances, a completely finished product--the bottle design was fully realized, the beverage was brewed and ice cold, and the ads all printed--yet the 'product' didn't even exist outside the walls of their company or that focus group. You never would have known it, however, by looking at the bottle. They had put time and effort into a fully-realized prototype, because you can't be sure about a product by hearing a description of how it tastes--you have to taste it, see it, smell it and feel it to really know for sure.

That was ten years ago. Since then, I have done hundreds of radio station focus groups. Almost all of them have been to take the temperature of an existing product, and very few have been to explore a potentially new, untried format. For those that explored the latter, not one of them provided the potential audience with the same kind of fully-realized prototype that those beverage marketers came up with for their focus groups. Instead, we resort to 'descriptors,' 5-song montages and vague concepts. Of course, anything we bring into a focus group is, by definition, an inadequate proxy for what a consumer might encounter in situ in the real world. But I'd love to see this kind of prototyping done more often in radio, and I will continue to push for it more and more with my clients. You have loads of creative folks in your production departments--why not let them strut their stuff for research purposes?

And the beverage? It was a mixture of ginger ale, vodka and pure evil. It never made it to market--and that, no doubt, saved them a fortune.