Excess Share of Voice

The gap between a brand's share of category advertising voice and its share of market, which predicts the direction and rate of share change.

Lineage: Peckham at Nielsen (1970s) → J.P. Jones, HBR (1990) → Binet & Field coined ESOV

What it does

When share of voice exceeds share of market you gain share; below it you lose. Reframes the budget question from an absolute number to a position relative to competitors.

When it breaks

Share-of-voice measurement gets less reliable as media fragments, and the model ignores creative quality entirely — excess voice for a bad ad buys nothing.

Case

Nielsen analysed 123 brands across 30 categories and found a 10-point gap between share of voice and share of market produced roughly 0.5 percentage points of extra market share growth over a year. Modelled over three years, an investing brand gained 15% share while a disinvesting one lost 20%.

Nielsen — does share of voice matter? ↗

Diagram — not yet drawn

SOV and SOM as two lines over time, with the area between them shaded and the resulting share change drawn as a lagged third line.

In the wild

Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment

What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.

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