by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Broadcasting from Polokwane in the far north of the country, Capricorn FM is a model for how a radio station can succeed in a secondary economy.
Not only is Capricorn’s growth pertinent because we have two new stations – Vuma FM in Durban and Smile FM in Cape Town – launched outside the Gauteng economic powerhouse in the past year but new FM-radio licences are up for grabs for the Eastern Cape, Free State and the Northern Cape.
Launched in 2007, Capricorn FM has close to 1.5-million listeners, according to the latest RAMS figures (August 2013). It aims to be a station for all language and race groups in Limpopo and broadcasts in 70% English and 30% vernacular: in Sepedi, Tshivenda and Tsonga. It plays 70% music from Afro-soul and R&B to kwaito and house with gospel and jazz at the weekends.
An examination of Capricorn also gives one a peek into the corporate culture of South Africa’s other new radio station, Gauteng’s Power FM, that was launched in June because it the same man behind both: Given Mkhari, CEO of the MSG Afrika Investment Holdings.
Once a popular Metro FM presenter, Mkhari is becoming an influential player in SA media. Besides Power and Capricorn, Mkhari is also bidding for the new FM licences in the Eastern Cape and the Free State, for stations to be modelled on Capricorn.
He was also part of a MultiChoice-backed consortium that made a bid – unsuccessfully – for the troubled TopTV earlier this year.
So what is the secret of Capricorn’s success?
Well, it has the same ethos as Power FM: what Mkhari calls a target market based on “psychographics” rather than demographics.
Rather than going after listeners from certain LSM, language, gender and race groups, both stations have set out to be inclusive – to be a station for ALL the people of Limpopo or for ALL of Gauteng – and to connect people who are keen to develop their community and their idea of nationhood.
“The opportunity for us at the onset was to build a radio station that would bring the people of Limpopo on a journey to see themselves, firstly, as South Africans before they see themselves as Pedi, Venda or Shangaan,” Mkhari told Grubstreet recently. “Obviously from an advertiser’s perspective, there was opportunity as well. In the past if you wanted to speak to Limpopo, you would have to have recorded an Afrikaans ad for Jacaranda, a Pedi ad for Thobela, a Venda ad for Phalaphala and a Shangaan ad for Munghana Lonene.
“Our view was to come up with a radio station with which you could reach all the diverse people of Limpopo from an audience perspective as well as from an advertising perspective. We call it the gateway to the province of Limpopo. ”
Capricorn broke even in the first 14 months, Mkhari said, while Power is more than 270% ahead of advertising target month-on-month.
At the heart of Capricorn and Power FM’s corporate cultures, he says, is the idea for the radio stations to respond to societal needs. “We don’t programme for an audience; we programme for a nation,” Mkhari says. “Instead of making pure trade programming decision, we look at society overall and ask: ‘What do people really need right now? Where are they at? What are their aspirations and their fears? What is lacking? What is the gap?’”
Instead of emulating overseas broadcasting formulae, Mkhari believes that the future of broadcasting is authenticity.
“The more authentic content is, the more believable and the more it resonates with people,” he says.
However, it wasn’t all plain sailing with Capricorn. It took a while to spark the interest of big national advertisers, Mkhari says, so the station 
started with local advertisers.
“It took a while for them to cash in. Our response was to teach local advertisers the power of advertising on radio. That’s what really kept us going for the first two years. We got a lot of buy-in from local advertisers – some were private business that had no agencies. So we became a creative agency and produced the ads, we did the selling, the whole story.”
The other major challenge was to train staff from scratch as there were few established broadcasting people interested in moving to Limpopo to join Capricorn.
“Ninety-five percent of our broadcasters had no commercial broadcasting experience,” says Mkhari. “We had to build our own stars so it’s been a challenge but it was a great opportunity as well… We also had to put in our own people from the holding company to run it and build a management team. But five years on, none of the owners are involved and the guys are running the station on their own, obviously with strategic advice from ourselves.”
Mkhari believes that the Power management team will be able to fly solo by the end of the year.
“What we are finding about the Gauteng market is that it’s not too dissimilar to Capricorn’s in that you’ve only really had one real talk-radio station (Primedia’s 702) up till now (in Gauteng). So we’re having to build our own staff up.
“The opportunity that comes with this is that you sound different from 702 because they tend to have historically looked at talk from the news perspective. We drive a lot of our talk content and generate a lot of subject matters that, in the past, would not have been seen as typical talk-radio stuff. It’s quite fascinating, the kind of topics we hear coming up on Power.”
As an example of these different kinds of topics, Mkhari point to Eusebius McKaiser’s talk-show session a little while back about the “claphandonce” phenomenon on Twitter.
In African culture, to clap your hands once expresses the sentiment: “Oh, my goodness, I give up”, Mkhari says, rather than approval and so this has become a popular phrase and hashtag on social networks.
McKaiser’s show about it brought in a host of interesting calls from members of the public across the races.
“A traditional news-driven talk-radio station would never delve into something like that because it looks light. And yet, when you do delve into it, it talks to questions around social coherence and stereotyping like: ‘Does every black person know what “claphandonce” means? If you’re a white South African and you’ve seen it on Twitter and you feel like you’re alone (in puzzling over it), well guess what? You’re not the only one because there are a lot of black people who don’t know what it means in the context of Twitter even through they have been doing this all their lives.
“It’s a simple thing that gives you a bigger insight into society using Twitter as a reference, talking to some very interesting social dynamics of our people.
“Having said that,” says Mkhari, “we will still talk about (Zwelinzima) Vavi and the Zim elections. We’ll talk about nationalisation and (Nelson) Mandela – we talk about all things that are happening under the sun.”
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.