After dinner last night (at Bandera on N. Michigan Ave., by the way, which is a sister brand of Houston’s, at which I’ve probably eaten 200+ times in my lifetime and had a near-perfect meal every time, which is the subject of another column entirely), I had the opportunity to stop by an Apple Store and take a look at the new iPad mini.

My two-word review: It’s amazing.

To expand on that review slightly: It’s like holding in your hand the most perfect electronic device ever. It’s almost unbelievably compact and lightweight, yet because the screen takes up a bigger…
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Pandora’s stock has taken a big hit in recent weeks due to rumors that Apple is considering entering the Internet radio space. Similar concerns have been raised about Microsoft recently “reentering” the space of Internet radio (actually, it’s already in and has been for years — it’s simply rebranding its less-than-stellarly-successful “Zune Music Pass” as “Xbox Music Pass”), about the fact that Spotify is offering radio channels, and about the possibility of Google competing in the music space.

In all of these cases, I think the alarm is over-exaggerated.

Here’s why: Each…
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One of the big lessons I picked up from the marketing books of Al Ries and Jack Trout — “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” “Marketing Warfare,” “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” and several others — is the importance of having a color associated with your brand.

A great example is the world of rent-a-cars. The original leading firm in the space, Hertz, has used yellow (with black highlights) for decades. The “#2” firm (and I’m using quotation marks because they’re actually #3, but their marketing angle is that they’re #2 (so they try harder)) is Avis, which picked red…
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If you’ve been to a RAIN Summit in 2012 (Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Dallas, or Berlin), you may have seen my “State of the Industry Address,” in which I discussed the theories of author/consultant Clayton Christensen (“The Innovator’s Dilemma”) and argued that Internet radio is a “disruptive innovation.”

(By the way, the term “disruptive innovation” is thrown around pretty freely nowadays, but, as Christensen uses it, it has a very specific meaning: It’s a type of innovation that starts out worse than existing products in its category, and thus is experimented with but subsequently…
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Friends are good to have. Facebook is a fun way to connect with friends. “Social media” is an excellent channel for brands to communicate with their customers.

But sometimes is enough enough? On my way to work this morning in Chicago, there was a poster at the “el” stop for a local bakery, Turano, that primarily serves the food service industry. (I guess some of the restaurants I patronize purchase their bread and rolls from Turano, although since bread and rolls served in a restaurant are an unbranded product (as opposed to, say, ketchup), I would have no way to know which.)…
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There have been a lot of references in the trade press recently to the anticipated U.S. debut of Spotify that call it an “online radio service.” I believe that’s a misnomer. Here’s my rationale:

For many decades now, consumers have listened to two forms of audio entertainment. To make the discussion easier, let’s focus on music. Basically, you can listen to the music you own, or you can listen to the radio. Continue Reading →

Before we begin today’s regularly scheduled blog post, I would like to point out something important about the Pandora IPO situation that no one seems to have noticed: Except for costs associated with the process of going public, Pandora is profitable — and has been for the past year and a half!

According to the quarter-by-quarter level detail in their most-recent S-1 filing, Pandora was profitable on an operating basis (i.e., approx. EBITDA, and…
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Now that I think about it, a better way to do the math in the “RAIN Analysis” in our June 3rd issue might be, rather than looking at market capitalizations, to look at the “enterprise values” of radio station groups — how much the stations themselves are worth, as represented by the sum of what the shareholders own (i.e., the market capitalization) and what the banks own (i.e., the company’s debt).

Example: At the moment, the stock market thinks that Emmis’s assets…
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