Sample frameDay 317·Marketing · Spend

Good morning. There's a number your marketing budget only means something next to — and it isn't last year's budget.

Marketing.

Excess Share of Voice

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Add up what everyone chasing your buyer spent last year on being seen, work out your slice of it, and set that slice beside your share of the sales — which of the two is larger? If it's the sales, you're not being efficient. You're funding your own decline in instalments.

The idea

Day 48 gave you the shape of a marketing budget — roughly sixty per cent brand, forty per cent activation. It said nothing about the size. That question got answered first, by the same pair: Les Binet and Peter Field's Marketing in the Era of Accountability, published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in 2007, six years ahead of The Long and the Short of It and drawn from the same effectiveness databank. It runs on two fractions. Share of market is your slice of the category's sales. Share of voice is your slice of the category's advertising — how much of the noise in your market is yours. Take the voice figure, subtract the market figure, and what's left is excess share of voice. Brands running a positive excess tended to gain share; brands sitting below their market share tended to lose it, slowly, without anybody filing a report about it. The rough exchange rate they published: about ten points of excess bought around half a point of market share a year. The trap is judging a budget against your own history. Last year's spend tells you nothing about whether you'll be heard this year — the only comparison that means anything is against everyone else chasing the same buyer, and that number moves whether you look at it or not.

The framework

01
Two fractions, drawn from the same year.
Share of market is your revenue over the category's revenue. Share of voice is your spend on being seen over everyone's spend on being seen. Neither has to be perfect, but both have to be honest, and you can build the second without a media auditor: competitor ad libraries, search impression share, sponsorship lists, the trade press, the sales rep who tells you what the other side is running. Estimate a range rather than a point, then work from the pessimistic end. A rough number you actually revisit beats a precise one nobody ever produces.
02
Is the category the one you defined, or the one the buyer sees?
Both fractions have to be drawn round the same boundary, and the boundary belongs to the buyer rather than to your strategy deck. Measure your market share inside a comfortable niche and your share of voice against a broad category and the answer will be flattering and useless. Take the alternatives your last ten buyers genuinely weighed, draw the line round those, and compute both numbers inside it. If you sell into two categories that share nothing, run the calculation twice — a blended figure describes a market that doesn't exist.
03
Set the excess first, then the budget.
Most teams run this backwards: agree a budget, then hope it's enough. Reverse the order. Decide the share movement you want next year, convert it into the excess that implies — about twenty points of excess for each point of share, at the rate Binet and Field published — then add that excess to your current share of market to get the share of voice you'd have to buy, and price it against what the category is spending. Sometimes the number is unaffordable, and that's a finding rather than a failure: it's telling you to pick a narrower category, not a thinner presence in a wide one.
04
Your share of voice moves while you stand perfectly still.
This is the part that catches people out. Both numbers are relative, so a rival raising their spend cuts your share of voice without you changing a line of your budget, and a funded new entrant can push a whole category into deficit at once. Positive excess isn't a state you achieve and bank; it's a position you hold or surrender each year. Recompute both fractions annually, at the same point in the calendar, and treat an unexplained fall in your voice share as news rather than noise.

Members only · 4 principles + template + AI mentor

364 more frameworks are waiting.

Excess Share of Voice is Day 1 of 365. One framework every morning for a year — across strategy, sales, negotiation, leadership, and more.

$1 /day

Billed $365/yr · cancel any time

365 frameworks

12 topics · templates · AI mentor

Reserve your place — $365/yr →

One payment a year · the whole library · no auto-renewal.

More Marketing frameworks

All 28 marketing frameworks →