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The Importance of Measuring
Share of Experience (SOE)
November 2016
Fiona Blades
Chief Experience Officer

2. Introduction
Share ofVoice (SOV) has always been an important metric for marketers to monitor. It helps us
to understand how prominently we are promoting our brand versus similar efforts by
competitors. However, the SOV metric only measures what we, as marketers, push out. It
doesn’t measure what people who experience your brand actually pick up in their daily lives,
since it only includes Paid media, such as TV advertising and Outdoor.
The SOV metric cannot cover a brand’s Earned, Owned, and Environmental media.
Table 1 shows which touchpoints can and cannot be accurately tracked via spending monitors,
agencies, or attribution solution providers. In general,“pull” exposures that reflect excellence in
marketing cannot be measured with this approach.
Table 1.Table of brand touchpoints for which spending can be and cannot be measured categorically
with spending monitors, agencies, or attribution solutions providers.
This leads us to think: is there a measure of brand pick-up that gives a fuller picture?
We have investigated a new metric, Share of Experience (SOE), to see how this can help
marketers.
What is Share of Experience (SOE)?
Share of Experience is the percentage of total brand experiences had by a brand
in relation to the total market.
Can be measured Cannot be measured
Paid advertising on: Search impressions, paid or organic
TV
Visit to websites that are not owned by the
client (e.g. comparison or review)
OOH Social media impressions to a conversation
Radio Exposure at retail
Press Exposure via use
Internet (to some extent only) Exposure via observed use
Exposure in the news/reviews
Exposure in public place
Exposure at an event/sponsorship
Word of mouth
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3. In the case of airline brands, for example, we might see that Delta Air Lines has a 30% SOE,
meaning here that the Delta brand features in 30% of all experiences had by people with
airlines.
The specifics of how MESH captures brand experiences have been documented in other papers,
including “Better Customer Insight – in Real Time” (Harvard Business Review, September 2012).
We have been conducting these studies for nearly ten years, during which we have used our
database of experiences to analyze and to understand the potential power of the SOE metric.
However, it is the principle of SOE rather than data collection methods that are of key
importance here. Different ways to build an SOE metric, particularly with the advent of social
media and its real-time data feeds, may be developed in the future.
The crucial point at present is that data should pick up not only Paid (e.g.TV advertising), but
also Owned (e.g.Airline magazine), Earned (e.g. Conversation, PR and Social Media) and
Environmental (e.g. planes, airport media) touchpoints. Capturing a person’s emotional response
to an experience ‘in the moment’ adds another layer to SOE’s power because it allows us to
accurately record engagement.
How do people really experience your brand?
When we look at our data to see how brands are actually experienced by people, it
immediately stands out that paid advertising represents only a part of the total brand
experience.The proportion varies by industry, but in some cases, paid advertising can make up
as little as 26% of total brand experience.
In other words, up to 74% of people’s experience of brands is lost when only
focusing on paid media.
In alcoholic beverages, for example, brand encounters largely take place through consuming the
brands, seeing others drinking in on-premise environments or at home, advertising by retailers
and bars featuring the brand, experiential events, and festivals. Fewer touchpoints occur through
traditional media, such as TV and radio.
Putting SOV and SOE head to head
We know from the IPA and Nielsen that Excess Share ofVoice leads to growth in Share of
Market (“How Share ofVoice wins Market Share,” 2009).To grow market share, then, a brand
should plan to have a higher SOV than its market share. Given our knowledge that brand
experience comes from more than just paid media, we propose that SOE represents a better
metric to determine investment levels to grow market share.
Our analysts have tested SOE against SOV in relation to both market share and sales across a
number of sectors, such as services and durables.
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4. In every sector, we have found that a stronger correlation exists between SOE and
market share/sales than between SOV and market share/sales.
In Figure 1, for example, we have plotted brands A to I by their Market Share and Share ofVoice
or Share of Experience.While a relationship between Market Share and Share ofVoice exists, it
is clear that the data demonstrates a much stronger relationship between Market Share and
Share of Experience.
Figure 1. Comparison of SOE with SOV on correlation with Share of Market
It stands to reason, then, that big brands are more likely to generate more experiences. Brands
to watch, i.e. Brand G here, are those that generate a higher SOE than expected in relation to
their market share, meaning that these brands are likely to grow market share in the future.
For that reason, we suggest ensuring that you generate a Share of Experience in
excess of your market share in order to grow your brand.
Understanding the power of each channel
We can break down SOV by different advertising channels, and the same approach is possible
with SOE.The benefit of SOE, however, is that this breakdown additionally includes Owned,
Earned, and Environmental channels. See Figure 2 for the breakdown of brand experiences by
channel in the case of major air carrier Delta Air Lines.
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5. Figure 2.Airline experiences by touchpoint share
Since Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) picks up brand consideration before and after the
moment of real-time data capture, we can use statistical tools to unpack which channels most
strongly drive brand consideration. Beyond TV advertising, we have discovered that retailer
advertising (eg.Tesco or KFC advertising Pepsi) and peer observation (seeing someone else
using/drinking/eating a brand) significantly drive brand consideration.
In some instances, we have found that the retailer advertising a manufacturer’s
brand through a TV ad has been more positive and persuasive than the
manufacturer’s own TV ad.
Yet, how many marketers consider how to leverage their retail partners in brand building? And
how many of us measure Peer Observation? For example, we instinctively know the
importance of Apple’s white ear buds to the brand’s popularity, yet we rarely measure peer
observation.
Accordingly, marketers using SOE will be better equipped than their counterparts using SOV at
knowing in which channels to focus investments for maximum impact.
Not all experiences are created equally
For years, the industry has understood the importance of generating emotion.
Our analysis has demonstrated that a Positive Experience has three times the
impact of a Neutral Experience on brand consideration.
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6. This varies by market and, in some markets, a Neutral Experience can even have a negative
impact.
Therefore, it’s not only important to generate a high SOE as cost effectively as possible through
the right channels, a rich mix of Positive Experiences is also vital to spark brand growth.
By capturing the details of people’s experiences in an online diary, we have been
able to identify levers that drive a Positive Experience.
These factors include:
• the proposition/message – we know which messages are most likely to drive Positive
Experiences
• the placement – we can determine whether a poster at a London tube station is more
effective than the same poster located near a supermarket
• the context – we can see whether the same TV ad viewed on a Saturday generates more
positive response than when viewed on a Monday.
SOE, with its detail-oriented capabilities to understand experiences, offers marketers a more
useful, adaptable, and stronger framework than SOV to grow brands.
Figure 3.The MESH Experience Model
Increasing predictive power with Positivity
When looking at Share of Positive Experiences, even more predictive power becomes evident.
For one of our clients, a 1% increase in Share of Positive Experiences results in a 2.3% increase
in brand consideration during the subsequent month. Such a relationship creates a virtuous
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7. circle; people who are users of a particular brand, or would consider using it, tend to have more
positive experiences of this brand, which then causes further brand use.
Conclusion
We conclude that using the Share of Experience (SOE) metric will be more helpful to marketers
than using Share ofVoice (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
However, using both SOV and SOE metrics will demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of our
marketing activity.
In “The Ultimate Marketing Machine” (Harvard Business Review, 2014), authors Marc de Swaan
Arons, Frank van den Driest, and Keith Weed assert that “in fact, we believe that the most
important marketing metric will soon change from ‘share of wallet’ or ‘share of voice’ to ‘share
of experience.’” Our analysis firmly corroborates this argument.
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.
If marketers can draw a pie chart of where we spend our investment but not of
how people pick up our brand experiences, we need to change our perspective.
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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