Is Share of Experience the NEW Share of Voice?

Share of voice (SOV) has always been an important metric for marketers to monitor. It helps us to understand how prominently we are promoting our brand versus competitors. But SOV only measures what we, as marketers, push out.

It doesn’t measure what people actually pick up; and it only includes paid media, such as TV advertising and outdoor. It doesn’t cover earned, owned and environmental media. Is there a measure of brand pickup that gives a fuller picture? 

We have investigated a new metric – share of experience (SOE) – to see how this can help marketers. Share of experience is the percentage of total brand experiences that a brand has in relation to the total market. So if we are looking at airline brands, we might see that Delta Air Lines has 30% SOE, meaning that it has 30% of all experiences that people have with airlines.

Drawing on data-driven evidence from over one million experiences we’ve collected over the past 10 years, we believe that using the Share of Experience (SOE) metric will be more helpful to marketers than using Share of Voice (SOV) to unlock brand growth because SOE:

• has a stronger relationship with market share than SOV
• can be broken down into Owned, Earned and Environmental experiences—as well as Paid—to enable 360 marketing
• incorporates sentiment:  a Positive Experience has, on average, 3 times the impact of a Neutral one
• predicts brand consideration the following month, and for those in purchase window, we have seen this impact continue for up to six months
• reflects what people pick up, not what we, as marketers, push out
• can be further utilized by analyzing Share of Positive Experiences to find an even greater predictive power

In a marketing era where Chief Marketing Officers find new roles as Chief Experience Officers, a matching set of metrics and models is essential. Taking an Experience-Driven Marketing approach will help marketers to grow their brands more effectively than using traditional tools. We urge the marketing community to measure Share of Experience in order to meet the evolving needs of an experience-based economy. 

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