The Capital FM Story

 I had the pleasure last year of speaking at the Foundation Forum alongside the amazingly talented Michelle Morgan, co-founder of Livity and Paula Nickolds, the now MD of John Lewis, about targeting Generation Z.

My story was about Capital FM and how it reinvented itself into the first national competitor to Radio 1 in 40 years and in the process increasing its audience five fold to 7.5 million. How in London alone it became the most listened to radio brand for under 15 year olds, making it Generation Z 's radio brand of choice.

 As Global’s Group Marketing Director at the time here are 3 truths I learned as part of that reinvention

Truth 1.  Find a motivator that matters.

Here is a quote we have heard too often from the older generation describing the youth of today.

 "The world is passing through troubled times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress."

 You may be surprised though to discover that this was written in A.D.1274, nearly 800 years ago by a man called Peter the Hermit. (Sound’s like a fun guy!)

My point is that in marketing we like to segment and pigeonhole target audiences using terms like Generation X and Generation Z.

These are of course helpful up to a point but many of the behaviours that define young people today are driven by motivators that are ancient.

If we can tap into these motivators we stand a far better chance of making our brands relevant and useful to these new emerging customers.

 For Capital that motivator was the fear of missing out. Knowledge is power and being seen to know the latest, hottest music and fashions, significantly increases that feeling of belonging.

 Without that knowledge there is a deep underlying fear of being excluded, of missing out on being part of the in-crowd.

 So Capital started building a brand that connected first with listeners hearts not their heads using “What’s Hot Right Now” content whether that be music, bars, movies, tech. The ambition was to make everything we did live and breathe the Now.

 We needed to gain trust back from younger audiences that we were the short cut, go too place for all things “Hot Right Now.”

 Truth 2.  Dream Big.

 Capital under the good stewardship of Global recognised early that if it was going to get confidence back from a new generation of listeners it had to think and act big.

So it had to start dreaming the impossible. And the funny thing is, the more you dream the impossible the greater the chances become of it becoming probable.

There was a vision that came from the very top of the business that Capital could be great again.

So first we brought back Party in the Park something that Capital had been famous for in the 80’s and reinvented it with state of the art Wembley Stadium and O2 gigs fronted by the worlds biggest stars.

Then we followed that up by deciding to take 8 regional radio stations across the United Kingdom and rebrand them to Capital.

But here was the rub when it came to advertising. To benefit from economies of scale we needed to run the same big creative idea everywhere.

That meant Scotland, Wales, Manchester, Birmingham, and London all running the same ad. How could a radio station named after England’s Capital city ever hope to do that in Scotland of Wales?

The truth came from recognising that these audiences didn’t identify themselves first by geography but from something deeper, this power of belonging.

 We managed to convince the worlds biggest music stars to be in the launch ad including Rihanna who was to front it.

We then asked her to name check all nine of our radio stations so we could create localised versions for every station. That way when people in Edinburgh and Glasgow heard Rihanna say “Listen up Scotland” it simultaneously felt global and local. The result was pop dynamite.

 Truth 3. Build a team that can make it happen.

There is an old African saying, “if you want to travel fast travel alone. If you want to travel far travel together”. Outstanding achievements are rarely just the result of a single individuals vision but almost always about the quality of the team behind that vision.

We needed to build teams around Capital that lived and breathed these new audiences lives.

We pulled together talent that naturally got the social language and conversations that the Generation Z audience were having and joined in.

Then we assembled a brand team centrally and most critically on the ground across our nine different sites that could connect up what we did on air, with how we behaved online, to how we engaged with them on the ground through our 100’s of live events.

Getting that consistency right created the integrity that is fundamental to brands today, whether they be youth targeted on not.

 Today confidence is booming at Capital, as is mobile listening as it continues to reinvent itself for the new generation.

 The future is looking bright and at the heart of that future is a brand that is taping into a motivator that matters, being useful and relevant to a new generation of listeners that are obsessed with the NOW.

Giles Pearman 

Co-Founder MyBrandTruth Ltd.