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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Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re giving up on their well-reviewed iPod competitor, the Microsoft Zune — one of the most-prominent selling points of which was its inclusion of FM and HD radio.

This is telling. Even though the Zune was an attractively-designed, well-priced device, with what would seem like a valuable selling point in its radio feature, Apple’s iPod is maintaining about a 75% share of the MP3 player market and Zune is rumored to be somewhere around a 2% share. (Cumulative sales to date tell a similar story:…
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Wow, when business journalists write about a topic you know about, you can see how wrong they often are… and thus get worried about what you read on every other topic!

The Pandora IPO story over the weekend was a great example. Some well-known, well-respected publications made the following mistakes:

One top business magazine wrote about Pandora’s “$100 million in profits last year,” because they confusing “revenues” with “profits,” which are actually…
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