Market Share with Lower Share of Voice
One of my clients asked this question yesterday, “Can we grow share even when our competitors are outspending us? Is it possible to increase share with lower share of voice?” It’s a question that comes up often, especially with smaller companies who face deep-pocketed rivals. Not everyone has the media spend of a P&G, Johnson & Johnson or Toyota (3 of the top 10 global advertisers). Here are a few ideas to fight higher-spending competitors:
- Choose whom to talk with – Often the biggest competitors try to cover either the entire market or at least a very large part of it, Choosing a sharply defined target audience can help you be laser focused on whom to engage and therefore bring your media costs down sharply. It is far easier and cheaper to get effective reach for a well-defined target audience. Segmentation-focus has many benefits; the efficiency in media spends being just one of them.
- Be clear in your messaging task – Generally speaking, more complex messages require higher frequencies. Simple messages are not only more effective but also far more efficient to communicate. Here is a simple framework to develop your messaging task.
To keep the message simple, try and resist the temptation of cramming too many things into this table. Ideally you want one rational and emotional change to achieve through your messaging.
- When you are on trend, you win – Knowing what to say is more important than how many times you say it or to how many people you say it to. There are many shifts happening today in consumer’s attitudes and behavior. Understanding these trends and developing a message that resonates with consumer’s hopes and fears can de-position even higher spending competitors.
- Media before creative – Often times teams decide on the creative well before they select the media mix. This can be because of various factors – personal preference for a certain medium, history, creative agency comfort and competitor’s activities. None of these however warrant you to pre-decide which media you should be in. The key factor driving media, and therefore creative choice, should be the contacts at which the target consumer is open to engagement. You can save a packet by selecting the media mix based on insights about the contacts which have the greatest influence on your target consumer’s choices.
- Maintain flexibility in media plans - Media rates can vary substantially through the year. If your product/service is not seasonally driven, you can shift your heavy media spends to the time of year at which media rates are lower, giving you more for your $s.
- Explore new media – Enough and more ink has been spilled in the last few years on the promise of the Internet, social networking and the so-called new media to revolutionize the advertising landscape. We do agree that new media can indeed be very helpful (lower CPMs, more measurability) and should definitely be explored by marketers with any sized budget. But we would like to add that blindly spending on new media because it is the new cool thing is as misguided as spending unquestioningly on TV because of historical spends.
At the end of the day share of voice can be a misleading metric. It assumes that every contact is equally important when extensive research (and common sense) tells us that consumers in a category are more influenced by certain contacts far more than others. So don’t let high spending competitors cow you down, Generate insights about your target segment, come up with a simple and compelling message, focus on the most influential contacts and prepare to surprise everyone with market share gains even with lower relative spends.
