Radio City is enjoying the second position among FM stations in the country, according to RAM data, and seems to be comfortable with itself. After changing the content in Mumbai; Radio City recently gave its Delhi station a makeover.

Anushree Bhattacharyya, in conversation with Radio City CEO Apurva Purohit, finds out more about Radio City's different positioning.

Excerpts:

To what extent is Radio City's programming backed by research?

Yes, we do a lot of research. In fact, we are possibly the heaviest spenders on research with consumers and largely with radio listeners. Clearly, there are two reasons why people listen to radio; one is the music played by the station and secondly, the packaging of the station. The music that we play is thoroughly researched.

As per RAM, Radio City holds the second position in the country today; is the data satisfying enough?

No, naturally it's a very basic desire for everyone to be at the number one spot. Nevertheless, we are very happy with our position in Mumbai. In Delhi, we would like to decrease the distance and move to number one position and there are many initiatives that have been designed for that. But at an overall situation; across the country we are at a good number two position. And we are happy with this position.

You play music that's targeted at the older TG. Why doesn't Radio City believe in playing recent hit music?

We have never played niche music; we play the music that is liked by our audiences. Yet, the reality is that we play music for a slightly old target group between the age group of 20 to 30 years and not exactly for teenagers. So, we play music that is more familiar. So, we certainly play hit music but more familiar hit music.

A few radio stations like Red FM or Radio Mirchi have built brands around their jockeys; while this seems to be missing in City. Do you feel it's not worth doing this as earlier many popular RJS have left City?

That's not true. My question is; if their RJs are so famous, then why are they not the number one station? What is the position of Red FM in Delhi today; it has the number four or the number five position in the city. So, they may be the more written ...about RJs or more visible RJs, while popularity drives time spent listening. In Delhi, we have the second highest time spent listening to our station while in Mumbai, we have highest time spent listening. So, if listeners don't like our RJS; why are they listening to us? Popularity by us is defined by the time spent listening to the station. And no, we have no plans to build our brand around RJs; we are very clear that we want to build the brand Radio City.

Since you enjoy the number two position overall, so do we see a change in the strategy in other stations as well apart from Delhi?

We have our brand health monitors in each of the cities where we are present and we track them on a regular basis. So we manoeuvre and monitor or change programmes according to research. As of now, the research is saying we are doing very well in Ahmedabad, Pune and Baroda and we are happy with this. And the moment the research tells us that we need to skew it slightly; we skew it.

How much importance does Radio City give to below the line promotion that includes, road shows, events etc?

We do invest heavily on ground activations. Every month, a marketing initiative has been planned with the aim of bringing our target audiences closer to our stations. And I think our marketing spends are also amongst the second highest in the country today.

How do you plan to leverage from the recently launched online property Planet Radio City?

Both of them are separate businesses which can do very well in isolation. We believe there is lot of potential in the Internet space, and especially in this specific space of networking around music. So I think Planet Radio City is going to do really good in the future. In fact, we are already getting a large number of page views and hits. As per synergising both the properties; people now consume radio while they are online; so I think there is a lot of scope of synergy between the two products. For example Planet Radio City has no geographical bondage and it can also travel to the US as it's an online property, while Radio City is restricted to the 20 cities where is has the license to operate.