Excess Share of Voice (ESOV)

Excess Share of Voice (ESOV)

What is this metric?

This metric compares the amount a brand is spending in marketing to the revenue that the brand is earning as a business, relative to its competitors.

How is this metric calculated?

BlueOcean bases this metric on two component metrics: Offline Paid Media, and Annual Revenue.  For each of these two metrics, we calculate a ratio of your value to the average value of your competitors, to create Share of Voice (your media expenditure over the media expenditure made by your market as a whole) and Share of Market (your revenue over the revenue of your market as a whole) values.  Excess Share of Voice is calculated by taking the difference of these two ratios: ESOV = Share_of_Voice - Share_of_Market.

How is this information valuable to my brand?

Excess Share of Voice is typically used as a spending benchmark.  Given your size and resources, are you spending a higher percentage of your revenue on marketing, or a lower percentage?  Or right on the average?

By getting a revenue-independent gauge of marketing spending, you can align your spending strategy with your marketing goals.  If you’re seeking to aggressively grab market share from competitors, you should likely be investing in marketing more aggressively than they are.  If you’re seeking to tread water and maintain share then you should be attempting to approximately match your competitor spending.  As a simple evaluation of overall spending relative to business size, this metric is especially useful when making a case for a marketing budget that aligns with your strategic goals.