I have reviewed the recent video recording on Will investing more than your brand’s Share of Voice increase its Share of Market? and I am not clear on the suggested approach to SOV / SOM mentioned ( advertising intensity derived approach). Can you please explain to me what you are talking about here?
I am also interested to know how you recommend to build campaign as a whole, if you had the same approach to campaign balancing brand building (60%) and sales driving (40%) as IPA does.
Thank you for watching the video. The approach suggested is the Advertising Intensity Relationship discovered by Jones (1990).
Jones identified a systematic pattern between Share of Voice (SoV), Share of Market (SoM) and brand size. Jones (and subsequent others) found a downward sloping pattern: smaller brands typically had greater SoV for their size, and larger brands lesser SoV for their size. This suggests that rather than just using SoV=SoM (e.g. a brand with 10% SoM aims for 10% SoV), there are subtleties based on brand size.
This pattern has also been found to hold in recent research we conducted across 24 categories over six years (See ‘current study’ in image above). However, it is important to note that this downward sloping pattern was not evident in our recent study for all categories and time periods. The pattern discovered by Jones was present 67% of the time across 168 observations of the Advertising Intensity Relationship (144 annual observations (24 categories x 6 years), and 24 aggregate category observations). There were only 10% of observations displaying flat relationships (that is where the SoV=SoM relationship holds) and 24% of observations displayed positive, upward relationships (bigger brands spending more than their share).
Thus drawing on SoV=SoM as an approach is typically not the right relationship (only evident in 10% of observations in our recent study) – relying on this approach may suggest budgets too small for smaller brands and too big for the larger brands. It is key to understand the relationship between SoV, SoM and brand size in your individual category and market, as it will likely vary to SoV=SoM.
With regards to your other question about balancing a campaign between brand building and sales driving advertisements, our recommendation is that all advertising should be easily identifiable to the brand and ideally communicate a Category Entry Point (CEP). The brand is mandatory whether you include a CEP or not. CEPs are the reasons consumers buy from the category i.e. ‘when I need a snack between meals’, ‘when I am hungry’. To maintain and build mental availability, advertising needs to refresh and reinforce the memories linked to the brand and relevant CEPs, to increase the chance the brand will come to mind next time someone ‘needs a snack between meals’.
We don’t have specific benchmarks like IPA, however, it is important to remember that each individual consumer will buy from the category as if randomly. That is, we have no way of knowing when each individual consumer will next buy, so we need to plan our advertising campaigns to ensure it is reaching as many category consumers as possible, to increase the chance of exposing some of them close to their next purchase occasion, also while communicating a CEP. You will reach many category consumers who are not ready to buy (i..e they just purchased last week) but seeing your advertising can still impact their mental availability.
For more on this topic, I’ve included some links to discussions about brand building and product advertising from our website.
What are the differences between product advertising and brand-building advertising?
How does master brand advertising help build memory structures of variants?
What is your opinion of equity advertising versus product focussed advertising in a COVID world?
K.V & C.D.
18 March 2021
