Its Scorching!. Review on Radio Mirchi

Its 7 AM. You don?t have any reason to wake up. But still you woke up. The concept of bed coffee is redefined as you searched where your radio is without even noticing the coffee cup. Turned it on. Its time for Hello Chennai. Here comes the sweet voice of RJ Suchitra which has all the makings of starting your day with a bang! The RJ popularly known as Suchi, know how to pep-up you with her bouncy and live wire presentment. Now that?s what I call the tone that gets you started out!

In case you are wondering what I was talking about, I was talking about Radio Mirchi, Chennai?s hottest radio station. The one that caused radio to reincarnate in the minds of Chennaites. All hells broke loose one day when the Govt. allowed private players to run FM stations a few years back. It has lead to the mushrooming of many FM stations including Radio City(Murdoch?s controversial investment),RED FM and Radio Mirchi(of the Times Group) and which in turn had more number of people turning on to their radio sets. That has given a quantum leap for radio in its Product Life Cycle (PLC) curve. That?s how it all started.

Chennai is culturally rich and technically advanced. It is evident not only in the movies made here and other forms of art but among the people here who these days, likes anything that perfectly blends their culture and the crème-de-la-crème of that of the north without making theirs pallid. North, in turn follows the same formula in blending the western culture with theirs. It was something that surprised me because I also was among those who considered Chennai as one of those conventional cities. I am not talking about an absolute change but a progress that it seem to be making. And it is that factor that Radio Mirchi cashed in and the very reason why it could be a perfect case study for this cultural shift.

Radio Mirchi is part of the media giant Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd. It made its way to the top with its innovative and classy programming and aggressive marketing. It has left behind the still-cliché Suryan FM which has stuck to the same formula that All India Radio has been following for decades (Or at least on the same line).

Mirchi however sailed off the beaten trails. It has conflated its successfully launched programming equations (in Delhi and other north Indian cities) with the south Indian style by adding a Madrasi flavor to it. It has a repertoire that features all kinds of songs including its hugely popular Old is Gold (9 PM) that features old songs and Kadhala Kadhala (11 PM) which plays both old and new romantic songs. Hence it was able to build a perfect flux of both old and new generation viewer base. The entire programming was in Tamil. So does this make Mirchi less happening for the party lovers? Not really. It has got trance, rap, R&B, techno and all kinds of party music being played on Saturday nights.

Mirchi has also the best RJ?s in town. The versatile RJ Suchitra Ramadorai, the award winning author of The Runaway Peppercorn and a talented singer is undoubtedly the best. As a regular listener of Radio Mirchi, I have become an aficionado of her voice and her jokes albeit being a non-Tamil. Humor is mixed up in all the promos. They are sometimes hilarious, sometimes outrageous and invariably, sometimes pathetic. But what is astonishing is that they made it all look like something that?s acceptable to an average and high class Tamilian alike.

There?s something about Mirchi that most may not have noticed. It has successfully launched a formula that most would have thought will never work in Chennai. It has programmed using almost the same percept and rationale that it used in a relatively unconventional and vogue north Indian cities. It realized that the key lies in integrating and synchronizing it with the local culture so that even a street man can say what Radio Mirchi stand for.

And not only has they proven it but they did it in style. As Akio Morita, the awesome founder of Sony Corporation said, if your product don?t have a market, then create one. Mirchi wasn?t actually creating a market, it churned out what others couldn?t see and made the best of it. Its not inappropriate to think that Mirchi is defining a generation here as Nike did a decade ago to the American generation Y or something of that kind.