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Thoroughly researched...
An introduction to audience research and why it is important on your station. Grab that clipboard and let's go...
Research is absolutely vital on any station, and it's not particularly difficult to do. Take a clipboard and go and stand on your local high street for an hour or so. You'll then have an almighty weapon against the other people in your station; because you have done your homework.
Give an interviewee a list of 20-30 well-known artists/bands with three tick boxes with "often", "sometimes", "never" next to each of them. Ask the question "When would you like to hear songs by this artist being played on the radio?". Get their sex and age and weight your answers roughly to the demographic you are targetting.
Yes it's crude but it will start to give you an idea of what your listeners are wanting to hear.
Shows being badly preped is always going to be a problem; but this can often be down to presenters not knowing what to do and talk about. Asking questions in your research will give them some pointers (whether they want local news, sport; what their favourite TV programmes are etc etc).
This research will give you pointers; not necessarily the answers. I'd hate to think that anyone would ever do something along the lines of "23% of our listeners wanted weather; so you need to talk about weather 23% of the time".
What you should then be able to do is steer people to playing music that the listeners want rather than something that is a personal preference. And if anyone complains, you've got to get a bit ruthless - the station is bigger than the individual. You wouldn't get a manager at Gap saying "Well, we think no-one will buy these shirts but we'll keep making them because we don't want to upset the designer."
You shouldn't live or die by your research... if you discover that only 5% of your audience liked the northern-soul you were playing, but that 5% all said that they "really wanted to hear" that music then there is a very valuable reason for having a northern-soul show. It would be a higher priority over a music type that say 15% of the audience said they "might want to hear".