What’s Your Personality?

October 1, 2026

Image by Visual Tag Mx of Pixabay.com

This week’s Monday Morning Memo from Roy Williams is particularly applicable to radio.

He wrote:

Corporations do not have personalities. Corporations have brands. A brilliant corporate brand has a personality that lives inside our mind…We do not bond with corporations. We bond with personalities.

Here’s the kicker:

A brand personality is an imaginary person that lives in the mind of the customer. The more deeply that a customer feels like they “know” the brand, the more likely they are to choose that brand. They are buying from a trusted friend.

Sustainable and scalable ad campaigns are a series of stories that reveal the personality of a brand.

Notice that I said “reveal” the personality. You cannot explain your brand personality. You must allow the public to experience it.

In radio we love to tout our stations as brands. They stand for something in our listeners’ minds. They are supposed to establish some sort of emotional bond with our audience that keeps them coming back for more.

But how do we “reveal” our brand personality? It can’t just be the music we play—we’ve ceded much of that territory to the streamers.

It’s the stuff that goes between the songs. It’s our human talent (live or voice tracked). It’s our imaging. It’s our promotions. And, yes, it’s even the commercials we play.

Do you use that audio real estate to tell a brand story or just to sell a feature?

“The (city’s) #1 Hit Music Station” is not a brand story.

A liner inviting your fans to “download the app” is not a brand story.

A van hit at the local car dealer is not a brand story.

Why? Because they contain no listener benefits. Everyone in this world (including you) constantly asks the question, “What’s in it for ME?”

Are you solving my problem? Are you giving me something I cannot get anywhere else? Are you, at the very least, making me feel…something…anything?

Storytelling is an art. Art takes time, focus, and effort. However, what comes out of that funnel is magic.

How much time do your live humans spend on developing your brand story? Yes, they may be tracking six stations and programming four, but what comes out of the speakers is your story.

Imaging is likely your biggest on-air personality. How much time do you spend on writing, re-writing, and freshening that content (and it IS content)? Are you saying anything that will pique their interest?

Your listeners live in a cloud of media clutter. What are you doing to stand out in that crowd?

The questions you may want to ask yourself and your team are: What is our brand personality? And, how are we revealing that to our listeners?

If you cannot definitively answer those questions, you don’t have a brand. You have a commodity.

Feel free to tell me I’m full of it: sallan@researchdirectorinc.com

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