Click the photo to purchase this “welcome mat” on Etsy
One of the things you learn when you first break into the business is that radio is a “lifestyle medium”—that is, it goes along with pretty much most of our day-to-day activities. Radio is often in the background, but very much present, while we’re doing other things—driving, working, physical activities, and pretty much everything else.
That’s why its important whether you’ve got a hand in content or revenue in your radio (OK, your media) company, and that you have a firm understanding of what your listeners are doing when they’re not listening to you. By the way, if you’ve heard that line before, it’s because I open every Techsurvey presentation with it. The stated purpose of our extensive national studies among radio’s core audiences is to foster a better understanding of what people do and why they do it. Incidentally, that same process goes into developing ratings, contests, and promotional strategies as well.
I’m no sociologist, but early on in my audience research education, I was taught about the importance of understanding behaviors. Decades later, those fundamental teachings very much accompany my planning and processing today. What are people doing these days, and what implications does this have on how, when, and where they listen? And what about the shifts in basic lifestyle activities—hanging out in the neighborhood, interacting with co-workers, and shopping habits?
I’ve got three examples for you revolving around how these basic activities have been rocked in recent years. And as I discovered, these shifts appear to be residual effects of the pandemic. We may conveniently think of COVID as being in the rearview mirrors of our lives, an event we’d just as soon forget. But the lingering impacts of 2020 are still very much with us today.
Here are three of these lifestyle swings worth considering as we program and market our stations:
Shopping is shifting – As we know from our own behaviors and the growth of services like Amazon Prime, millions of consumers would prefer to stay home and let pretty much everything be delivered to them. Obviously, this trend was turbocharged when the world first shut down in 2020. Services from InstaCart to DoorDash to Uber Eats flourished and continue to do brisk business five years later.
Online shopping has taken on a life of its own, as people are buying “stuff” at the oddest times on their phones—during meetings, in waiting rooms, in the car, and pretty much everywhere else they have Wi-Fi access.
That’s nothing new, but the eyebrow raising development is that men might surpass women in online shopping in the not-too-distant future. That’s the story from Chain Store Age, the 100 year-old publication that tracks these things.
They cite a new 2025 Consumer Insights Report commissioned by the AI-powered marketing platform Wunderkind. Among the insights, one-third (33%) of men say they’ll increase their online shopping, compared to just over one in four women (26%).
Adding to this gender shopping shift, the study reports that men (48%) more than women (45%) engage in online shopping 2-3 days a week.
I should have seen this one coming. Every year Techsurvey is fielded in January into early February, so we ask respondents to tell us the percentage of the past season’s holiday shopping that took place online.
As you can see below, the data has been steady and strong since the early days of the pandemic. Just over half say “all/most” of that year’s holiday shopping took place online.
But note the narrow gender gap. Men are nearly as likely to report saying the lion’s share of their holiday shopping occurred via the World Wide Web:
Changing workplace culture – A clearcut shift anyone still working knows all about is the WFH lifestyle. For companies that allow some employees to work from home even sometimes, the internal vibe just is not the same compared to those pre-pandemic days.
Even many of those now required to show up every day often wish they could work out of the house more often.
A new story in Gallup’s Workplace, “The Post-Pandemic Workplace: The Experiment Continues” affirms these changing desires. In fact, over half of “remote-capable employees” in the U.S. expect and prefer a hybrid work situation.
But the at-work change that jumped out at me is the loss of what Gallup calls “employee engagement,” measured by what they refer to as “12 essential employee needs.”
Their research shows a key difference in pre- and post-pandemic on the job mindset is the notion of knowing what is expected from employees at work. The drop off is dramatic over the past decade:
Perhaps hand in hand is the dramatic decrease in the percentage of U.S. employees who make the all-important connection between the company’s mission and their jobs.
Those who “strongly agree” with the statement, “The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important” is down to just three in ten employees:
Given the importance of “radio station culture” over the decades, the Gallup data compel broadcast leadership to consider whether COVID, WFH, and related behaviors and policies are having detrimental effects in certain markets.
Won’t you be my neighbor? – And finally, it’s about when we get home from work or that trip to the mall. What is life like in the ‘hood in 2025, and how does it impact how U.S. consumers conduct themselves?
This time around, the data is from Pew, and a study conducted in March related to whether consumers know and trust their neighbor.
It turns out a whopping three in four (74%) respondents say they only know some or none of their neighbors. The demographic detail below shows those who are least likely to know who lives next door are the youngest surveyed (18-49 year-olds) and those who consider themselves Democrats.
On the other end of the scale, those over 50+, residents of rural communities, and Republicans are most apt to act more “neighborly.” You can see these demographic dynamics on the chart below:
You might have also noticed another subgroup that has a higher incidence rate of knowing one’s neighbors: those who attend religious services monthly or more often. That might directly explain a stronger sense of connection among these more faith-based consumers.
In the Christian music version of Techsurvey, we continue to see that nearly eight in ten core listeners to these stations are regular church attendees:
Connecting these socio-economic dots is how strategists in both the programming and sales departments can use valuable research resources—often free—to better understand changing conditions among various affinity group members. They vary by format, and getting more granular, stations that gather “first-party data” from their actual fans can drill down even further into the mindset of their audience.
Even the small pieces of data and insights in this post, culled from Techsurvey data, provide new ways of thinking about audience lifestyles and how any station can apply these findings, whether they’re in the commercial, public, or Christian spaces.
Whether it’s developing station features that resonate or sales packages that capture the moment, the data can help radio with its ongoing narrative and its relevance in a rapidly changing media environment.
Originally published by Jacobs Media
