How Much Do CFOs Anticipate Passing The Buck to Customers?
The question is: How much of tariffs’ costs will be passed along to consumers?
Like so much of our worldview today, the answer is bifurcated. This week eMarketer polled CFOs to see where they envision the incremental costs going. Hint: It’s mostly all or nothing. But the other interesting insight: 32% of US adults believe it’s fair for companies to pass tariff costs along to shoppers in the form of higher prices. Emarketer’s key advice: Use this chart to benchmark your brand’s approach to competitors. And, if you need to raise prices, be transparent with your customers, and explore “added value messaging to maintain loyalty.”
Radio Ratings On The Rise
We started noticing unusual radio station ratings swings in some spot markets recently. Part of that increase is attributable to an evolution in Nielsen audio ratings methodology. The big methodological change is that three minutes of listening is the new five minutes of listening. In other words, if a station earns three minutes of listening, that 3-minute listening length gives the station credit for a full quarter hour.
In Boston, for example, that meant sports station WEEI-FM made its first top-five entry in years. And WROR fell out of the top five after a long run. The Sports Hub (WBZ-FM) in Boston reclaimed the top spot. You’ll notice that four of the five top stations in the graphic below are talk formats, and the one music format could be qualified as an outlier due to its holiday music schedule. This ratings insight jives with a recent industry survey of 25,000 radio listeners. In that survey, for the seventh consecutive year, “personalities” overshadowed “music” as the main driver of broadcast radio listening. Combine “local” as a core value – now, you’ve got “local” + “personality” to deliver a winning formula for spot-market radio.