The stock market is riding a roller coaster (mostly a down one this week, at least), while tariff news is getting threatened left and right by President Trump against multiple foreign nations. It’s undoubtedly a positive for our news cycle, but whether or not it is a positive for the country, I’ll let you decide on your radio shows.
But the point to drive home is how these two are related. The markets are clearly getting spooked by what they see as inconsistent policies that don’t have a specific timeline, a wing-it mentality that doesn’t appear to have as much planning behind it as is needed, and businesses that are paralyzing themselves as they try to figure out how to best navigate the current climate.
If your radio show is the President and your audience is the stock market, you can learn from this. You want to make sure your audience always knows where you’re going. Never allow them to guess. Don’t let them guess what’s coming up the next day, the next hour, or the segment.
If you’re doing something out of the ordinary in a certain daypart, pre-promote, tease it, and explain why. If you have a great guest coming up later in the show or in the next segment, tell your audience why they don’t want to miss it. Over-communicate.
They want to know exactly what they get when listening to your station.
This doesn’t mean your opinions or angles have to be predictable. In fact, keeping your audience on their toes can be a good thing. But it’s important to know that when they turn on your station, they will hear a familiar voice discussing familiar topics on-brand with the station. And all of the imaging, promos, liners, and even spots will have a certain sound, feel, and cadence that work well together and feel like they fit.
By the way, you can — and should — absolutely have topic variety, but it all has to be relatable to the mindset of the listener you are talking to on the other side. This doesn’t mean you do hard news and politics all day. But it means your other topics are ones that are also going to still be interesting and relatable to your P1, while widening your umbrella to gain more cume and TSL from your P2’s and P3’s.
To bring this conversation back to the tariffs and markets, there’s a strategy from the President when it comes to creating fair and equal trade, while also hoping to leverage America’s super power status to get certain concessions from various trading partners, be it economic or foreign policy.
Those could be communicated more effectively in a manner that would ease the markets and some of the jitters that exist. In fact, there’s a strong case to make for what the President is doing, even if it comes with some short-term pain.
But just like with your radio station, human beings don’t inherently like change. So over-communicating the why behind a move, and consistently signaling to your citizens, or in radio’s case, your listeners, that everything is going to be OK, is an important part of the equation.
Donald Trump is making a bet that he was elected, in part, to get Main Street back on track, not Wall Street. The markets had great years in 2023 and 2024, gaining 23% and 24%, respectively.
And the American people rewarded Democrats with absolutely nothing. They lost the House, Senate, and White House.
It’s a high-stakes game of poker the President is playing. And he can absolutely win this game, if he plays his cards right.
But from our perch hosting radio shows and/or full stations, there’s no benefit to us playing that game. That’s not our job. Consistency and transparency will win the day for us. It actually might be something the President could learn from us. Go figure.
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Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
