Are You Loud Enough to Grow?

A boutique fitness studio wants to double its membership within two years. It has excellent trainers, a beautiful space and loyal members. Its marketing consists of an occasional Instagram post and a flyer in the local coffee shop.

Meanwhile, the three bigger gyms nearby advertise constantly. Their names are on billboards, in local radio slots, on social media feeds and at every community event. When people in the area decide it’s time to get fit, those are the names that come to mind first. The studio’s owners wonder why growth is so slow, when their product is clearly better.

It’s a question many small businesses face: how much marketing does it take to grow, rather than simply stand still? One of the longest-standing rules of thumb in marketing offers a surprisingly clear answer, and it starts by comparing how much of the conversation you own with how much of the market you have.

One Like insight: To grow, a business usually needs to be heard more than its current size would suggest.

Share of voice and share of market

In 1990, John Philip Jones, a former advertising executive turned professor at Syracuse University, published an article in Harvard Business Review called “Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share”. He compared two numbers for hundreds of brands. Share of market is a brand’s percentage of category sales. Share of voice is its percentage of all the advertising in that category.

Jones found a strong relationship between the two. Smaller brands that wanted to grow, which he called “investment brands”, tended to spend more on advertising than their market share alone would justify. Larger, established brands often spent less than their share and took the difference as profit.

Later researchers turned this into a working rule of thumb. The gap between share of voice and share of market is called excess share of voice, or ESOV. Analysing data from the IPA’s effectiveness databank, Les Binet and Peter Field found that brands tend to grow market share in proportion to their ESOV: for every 10-point increase in excess share of voice, brands typically saw around half a percentage point of extra market share growth a year. A 2009 Nielsen analysis of 123 brands reached a similar figure.

The rule has limits. It describes averages across larger brands, mostly in established consumer categories. Creative quality matters enormously: a memorable campaign can earn far more attention than its budget suggests, while a forgettable one wastes even a big budget. And in today’s fragmented media, measuring total category spend is harder than it was in 1990. But the underlying logic still holds: brands that are consistently quieter than their competitors tend to shrink, and those that are louder tend to grow.

Estimating your share of voice

Most small businesses can’t calculate share of voice precisely. They don’t know competitors’ budgets, and local markets don’t publish neat figures. But you can estimate it well enough to be useful.

Define your real competitive set. List the businesses your customers actually choose between: perhaps five or six in your area or niche.

Look at visibility, not just spend. For a month, note how often you see each competitor: adverts, social posts, event sponsorships, local press, signage, search results. Rough tallies are enough. If you appear in a tenth of the moments where customers encounter businesses like yours, that’s your approximate share of voice.

Compare it with your share of the market. If you think you serve around a fifth of the local customers in your category, but you’re only a tenth of the visible conversation, you’re probably quieter than you need to be to grow.

Use search as a clue. Some marketers track “share of search”: how often people search for your business name compared with competitors’ names. Free tools such as Google Trends can give a rough comparison for larger businesses, though they may not show data for very small local names.

The answer isn’t always to spend more money. For small businesses, attention can also be earned through distinctive content, word of mouth, community presence and great creative ideas. The goal is to be noticed more than your size alone would predict.

Setting your volume

Once you have a rough sense of your share of voice and share of market, use them to set a direction. If your aim is simply to hold your position, being roughly as visible as your market share may be enough. If you want to grow, plan to be noticeably more visible than your current size, consistently, for at least a year. Spread that visibility across the channels where your customers actually are, and focus on reaching people who don’t yet buy from you, not just your existing fans.

Remember, too, that share of voice works best alongside a good product and a distinctive brand. As we explored in Why Promotions Alone Won’t Build a Brand Worth Owning and What Happens When You Stop Showing Up, being consistently present over time matters more than occasional bursts.

A few questions can help:

• Who are the five or six businesses our customers really choose between?
• How visible are we compared with them, honestly?
• Is our visibility above or below our share of the market?
• How could we earn more attention without simply spending more?

Which brings us back to the fitness studio and its occasional Instagram posts. Its product deserved more members. But in the competition for attention, it was the quietest voice in the neighbourhood. Consistent local presence, a regular community class, partnerships with nearby businesses and a recognisable look across everything it shares could lift its share of voice well above its size, and give it a far better chance of reaching that two-year goal.

Sources

1. John Philip Jones, “Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share”, Harvard Business Review, January–February 1990.
2. Les Binet and Peter Field, IPA Databank analyses (including Marketing in the Era of Accountability, 2007, and The Long and the Short of It, 2013), as summarised by Marketing Architects and others.
3. Nielsen, 2009 analysis of 123 brands across 30 categories, as reported by WARC and other summaries.