Building a brand costs money. But done well, the brand will prove a good investment. Raising your profile, generating customer loyalty and increasing sales are just some of the benefits.

When Martin Ball arrived on the South Coast to create a new radio station, he found himself in a well-populated market. ‘With 30 other stations, it was pretty messy,’ he says.

To attract listeners and advertisers, the way he positioned Wave 105 was going to be crucial. ‘We came up with the idea of radio for grown-ups, which was broad and accessible and played contemporary soft rock.’

The strapline, ‘the South’s best variety of hits’, was a spontaneous suggestion from a colleague. ‘Radio is an instinctive medium and a lot of branding is common sense,’ he says. ‘It’s helpful to use consumer testing to back yourself up though.’

In developing a logo for Wave, Ball wanted a clear, concise image that worked both on and off air, as well as appealing to listeners and advertisers. It had to be multi-layered, but totally consistent. It also had to allow for a lot of evolution. In particular, Ball wanted to be able to move from a flat black-and-white image to a four-colour multi-dimensional one. ‘We established a common use of colours and fonts, so the logo can always be pulled back to what is Wave 105.’

Most regional radio stations launching into a market of 1.8 million listeners would expect to have a £1 million budget. Ball had £250,000, so had to be creative in his marketing mix. As well as handpicking some outdoor poster sites, he has relied mainly on relationship marketing.

‘We try to go where the people are, so we have tie-ups with airports, shopping centres, leisure attractions and even house developers. It is a question of going beyond the obvious. If you employ an ad agency, you can spend money like water on traditional media.’

Ball prefers a DIY approach and signs any cheques himself. ‘We do the bulk of marketing in-house with a bit of specialist help. It is more powerful being closer to your listeners.’

Now part of Scottish Radio Holdings after being bought for £18 million in 2001, Wave 105 has become the leading commercial station in the South of England. Currently 350,000 listeners tune in for an average of nearly ten hours a week. ‘We have to invest continually in driving audience growth. We are holding our own against Radio 2, which has been going from strength to strength in most other areas of the UK.’

To compete against Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross, Ball relies on using regional information strands, particularly travel news. ‘Plus, we are not quite as eclectic as Radio 2. We do not spin off into different sorts of music in the evenings or weekends. The soft-rock feel runs right through to 10pm.’

In moving the brand forward, Ball is now spending £500,000 on marketing with revenues of £4.5 million. ‘It is all about awareness and curiosity. There will always be attrition in our core audience, so we have to keep driving new triallers.’

False positions
‘Like a well-furnished house in the wrong part of town, even the best products will struggle if they’ve been positioned in the wrong way or to the wrong audience,’ says Andy Nairn, planning director at advertising agency MCBD.

To get your brand into the right place at the right time, you cannot be small–minded about it, he says. ‘Too many companies conduct plenty of consumer research to identify what their immediate end-users want, but pay much less attention to the views of other important audiences, from their staff through their distributors to the media. Similarly, they focus exclusively on their product’s functional features, ignoring the fact that most human decision-making is emotionally based.’

‘In today’s world of multiple stakeholders and converging categories, you need to begin the positioning process with a much broader perspective. You should think less about what your products do and more about why your brands exist in the grand scheme of things.

‘While positioning can be a complex process, the end result should be as devastatingly simple as it is immediately recognisable. If you find it takes more than about thirty seconds to explain your new positioning, the chances are that you are over-complicating things. In fact, the best positioning can usually be expressed in one word, and this term often describes a very simple, but incredibly powerful human need. Volkswagen is all about "reliability", for instance.

‘The danger with any positioning is that the reality may fail to live up to the promise. It is at the practical, executional stage that many brands falter, prompting cynicism among internal and external audiences alike.’