I was watching a great documentary on Stax Records in Memphis the other night (the label of Otis Redding, The Staple Singers, Isaac Hayes, etc). And I noticed how much emphasis the record label put on getting their artists on the radio. Radio play was everything to them. Which is kinda ironic because, as a record label who obviously made money from record sales, Stax made no direct revenue from radio. But they depended on radio play to spread awareness, which was the all-important first step in conversion. 

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Awareness was critical to Stax artists’ success, because once a song was broadcast out to the public, it had a shot. It had a fighting chance of being heard and remembered and stuck in someone’s head. Those same people would tell their friends about the song or call into the station to request it again. THEN they might buy the record or even pay for a ticket to the artist’s concert. 

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But if an artist never made it to the radio, they’d be relying on fans buying their album on a complete one-off whim in the record store, or stumbling into a concert by sheer happenstance. Neither of which seem common in my experience. 

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Because it’s literally impossible to love a song you’ve never heard. And while it’s so obvious in this context, marketers seem to violate this logic more often than not. Awareness is that dubious, mysterious, hard-to-measure metric that leaves bean-counters shaking in their boots. But without it, you’re left selling to a small target audience who is looking for your exact solution at that exact moment — or clumsily stumbling into it by chance. In other words, you’re expecting someone to love your brand’s “song” without ever hearing it. 

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We always preach the mantra “Visibility = Profitability” to clients, because people don’t like to buy from brands they’ve never heard of. But visibility does WAY more than create familiarity. It gives you an opportunity to show how you solve a problem differently, or a chance to show how you understand what someone is feeling. 

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GEICO (aka Government Employees Insurance COmpany 😳) is a classic example of this. They didn’t change anything about insurance operations or invent some revolutionary insurance product. All they did was make their awareness-level advertising wildly entertaining, and they stayed consistent on “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on insurance.” If Government Employees Insurance COmpany never ran great awareness ads, do you think they’d be anywhere in your consideration set?

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Once you know what your brand’s “song” sounds like, blast it out over the airwaves, and make your audience aware of what you can solve or make possible. Nurture your buying audience with a consistent, focused message as they work down the funnel. And once they’re ready to walk into the proverbial record store to buy something, your chorus will already be ringing in their heads.

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