GLOBAL: In a marketing environment where greater emphasis is being placed on customer experience, marketers need to consider adopting a measure for share of brand experience rather than continuing to rely on share of voice.

Writing in the April issue of Admap, Leonie Galliford, head of insight at Zenith UK, acknowledges research showing that share of voice is an important driver of effectiveness after the creative work itself.

Brands must still focus on overall levels of investment relative to competitors if they want to drive change, she notes, but this fails to take account of how consumers are influenced by communication and messages that lie beyond paid media.

“The current convention of relying only on mass-media SOV for analysis means we are missing valuable information on investment in owned and earned channels,” Galliford argues.

She maintains that consumer perceptions about brands, and long-run market share between brands, are determined by each brand’s use of touchpoints and offers a new metric – brand experience share (BES) – which improves on SOV in several important ways.

To start with, BES is a holistic measurement that recognises not all touchpoints are equal, considering each individual channel and weighting recall according to how influential a touchpoint is in people's minds.

Similarly, tracking is based on speaking to consumers about what they’ve noticed, and what has actually influenced them when purchasing in a category, rather than using industry-reported spend as an indicator of what has been pushed out in advertising to people.

Galliford further reports that BES has far stronger correlation with market share than SOV – 95% vs 67% in an analysis of one FMCG category – and that a deeper dive proves BES is 8.5 times more effective than media SOV at driving growth.

Traditional SOV analysis provides a guide to overall budget levels but doesn’t tell you where best to invest, she points out.

“Putting consumer brand experience at the heart of budget planning, rather than spend levels, provides an enhanced and more holistic way to build our understanding of how what we do affects the bottom line.”

Touchpoints ROI Tracker utilises the MCA methodology. All rights to the MCA® measurement system including CCF™, BEP™ and BES™ are owned by Integration (Marketing and Communications) Limited and licensed to Publicis Media Limited and its affiliates.

Sourced from Admap