86% of Listeners Prefer Genuine Personalities Over Polished Ones

The 2024 CRS Research Presentation by Smith Geiger stated that 86% of listeners prefer genuine personalities over polished ones.

"So, what does that mean? I believe it means that people would rather hear a person from off the street who has the audacity to say what he really feels about a situation than a personality who tries to sound fancy, use big words, and beat around the bush to get to the point, wasting their time. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a nice polished sound on the air, but why can’t you just talk like a regular person? Some people have to go through years of dismantling that mindset of thinking that they have to turn into this character with a certain type of sounding voice in order for people to like them and to think that they're a professional disc jockey.

But the more you let that go and concentrate on saying things in the manner that you always speak, like when you are with your best friends from high school and you guys get together once a year and you make them laugh uncontrollably because you can be yourself with them… That’s the person that we want to hear on the radio; that’s the real you. I’m telling you, it takes a long time to program yourself, and that’s why today, the people that you hear on the radio have not been radio-ized, and people gravitate to them, sometimes more than people who have been doing radio for decades. You gotta get out of this jockey mode and just be a human.

Most people are afraid to let themselves be real… But I think we need to really study what is real and not just say it but really help people to understand what that is. They say just be real. Or just be authentic. There has to be some psychological work done on yourself first to really know who you are and what you stand for in life. So, this takes some time of feeling comfortable with who you are. Because some people really don’t even know themselves.

If you never give your true insight on things because you’re afraid of how somebody’s gonna judge what you say, then that’s not being real. When you feel like you have to say this in order to be pleasing to somebody and some of us are debilitated by the judgment of others, then you are not in tune with what it means to be yourself. And trust me, when you decide to be yourself and not be the same person that agrees with what everybody says as a yes man or yes woman, some people actually are not going to like you. So, I think that’s one of the things that you have to get comfortable with. You gotta be comfortable with people not liking you because of who you are and that’s fine.

So, it would be a shame to be a masquerade of yourself all your life because you’re afraid of people’s opinions about you. So, if you think about all the people that you like on the radio that have separated themselves from the mundane mediocrity that comes across the airways, you have to say that they reached the point in their career where they just let it go; they said, 'I’m just gonna be myself and whatever happens happens,' and then they found the door to their success.

Again, I must preface, I’m not talking about being vulgar. I’m not talking about being a shock jock, somebody who’s talking about highly sexualized content or somebody that makes disparaging comments about other people as their shtick. I’m not talking about that type of person. Most of the time, that’s a character that people think will get them the notoriety that they’re looking for, but it’s not. So, maybe we need to do some self-examination and spend a lot of time with ourselves and getting to know us so we can represent ourselves to the world. That’s what I think we should work on. You’ve got to trust the process. It may take years for you to really find your true voice of who you really are. I had to do that."