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What's in a name?
If you are setting up a new radio station, probably the most important marketing devise you'll have to think about is the name that you use.
A quick flick through Ofcom’s RSL application pages demonstrates the range of names, and one can only wonder the processes people have gone through to get to a suitable name. My own student station started out as Rub-a-dub radio, before ditching that in favour of the far better RamAir. Just 8 miles down the road, Huddersfield University’s first RSL went under the moniker of Ay Up! Although it did get some favourable TV coverage with a nice stunt of trying to find who could say it best – it was fairly obvious even before the transmitter was switched on that it didn’t really reflect the cutting edge image the station wanted. It opted for Melt on later broadcasts.
A name serves one really purpose; it brands and markets the station. Good station names become brands – Kiss, Magic and Heart are all station names that have extended into TV music channels and/or CDs. So make sure you all know what your brand values are and don’t pick “fuddy duddy” when you are going to be playing the latest kick-arse thrash metal.
If a strong element of your station is the area it is broadcasting then I would recommend you reflect that in your name. At it’s simplest level, stations like Huddersfield FM or Essex FM leave no room for guesswork as to who they are serving; but the use of river names (Clyde One, Radio Aire), famous landmarks (Minster FM), or even the local park (Stray FM) let the audience know that this is about a place they live. I’ve even suggested to one station that they use the first two letters of the local postcode as an identifier.
Getting creative with the name can produce some fantastic results; my favourite student radio station name (if one can have such a thing!) is Junction 11 – the station at Reading that is named after the motorway junction for the town. Equally, Insanity at Royal Holloway is named such because the university was built by Thomas Holloway, who also built the nearby Sanatorium.
Too many people assume that you simply need to pick a word and stick FM on the end of it. Pedants will argue that FM is a fairly useless term in an age of DAB radio and auto-tuning; particularly for stations that are not delivered by radio transmission (Asda FM and GFM for Granada service stations being two obvious examples). However the term is so associated with radio that Joe Public will automatically recognise Big FM as the name of a radio station.
My suggestion is that FM is acceptable, but what is a lot better is that you incorporate the frequency into the name. Your listeners are rarely going to talk about Galaxy 105 or Heart 106.2, but if you train your presenters and other staff to always refer to the station that way, both in speech and writing, you start pushing the most important piece of information your listeners need – the frequency. Q103 is a good example, B97 would have been great but listeners kept referring to it as its previous name Chiltern and the station had to change back. 103 Horizon feels slightly strange. And bear in mind that you might have problems if your station changes frequency – Two-Ten was great when the station broadcast on 210 metres; but it’s a bit messy now it is on the FM band.
Similarly, if your station is web-only, or going to heavily use its web presence, then building the URL into the name makes a lot of sense. Two-syllable names that end ‘om’ work really well, eg; “You’re listening to Switched-on-dot-com”, or ‘et’ “music still to come on Get-Set-Dot-Net”.
In an age where the web is an important marketing tool for your radio station, then you need to make sure your station name is onomatopoeic. That is, it is written as it sounds. The student station in Preston thought they could be clever by calling themselves Freak1C – but would anyone who heard that said on the radio be able to successfully Google the station? Equally, stations which drop the e before a x at the start of a word will suffer – xtreme and xpress are both student radio examples, but even the BBC falls foul; www.bbc.co.uk/1extra exists for just that reason.
Finally, don’t kid yourself into believing that an acronym will convey any form of branding; stations that set themselves up as BTCR will discover when they do research that no-one but no-one realises it stands for Big Town Community Radio. Acronyms don’t work; even the BBC – probably one of the best known TLAs around has a very low recall rate as to what it actually stands for. However its success is that BBC does have lots of brand values associated with it; but it has taken dominance in British society for the last 80 years to achieve that. BTCR will not be able to achieve that in four weeks on air.
If you want the proof in the pudding, then get yourself to Birmingham. Studies showed that very few listeners to BRMB actually knew what the letters stood for, despite it being the city’s main commercial station for 25 years. Again, history had established certain brand values which meant that Capital didn’t want to change the name when they took the station over. For the record the letters don’t stand for anything, they were chosen because they “sounded good”.