Share of Voice — a metric which is killing your brand and your role on the decision makers table

So #boycotterosnow was trending on Twitter in India last week. Eros Now is an OTT platform and it release some highly sexualized content using Bollywood celebrities on the occasion of Navratri- a major Hindu festival.

Which resulted in the familiar media and some celebrities talking about it

While calls for boycott, the resulting media coverage & brand apologies have become somewhat of a regular fare in India. And in our analysis a lot of marketers and publications will talk about

the new intolerant India 🇮🇳

or

the anger on Twitter

or

brands should not take a stand in a conservative country ( really?)

While some of it is completely true it points to two far bigger issues which plague marketing :

1. Marketing’s indifference to treating people as objects and sexualizing them.

It started with a pretty model in a bikini or a Bollywood star flaunting his underwear, it’s come to a point where we don’t need the models or stars…innuendo is enough.

Notice this campaign from Isobar Moscow.

The influencers first photo is so relevant to sustainability !

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGPVVF6FA2X/?igshid=133us3ronqac3

2. More importantly it points to a trend growing over the last few years which is now become a reality. A number of marketers will do anything to get the numbers.

Marketing has been reduced to high engagements , views , comments etc.

And frankly if numbers and metrics are what you are chasing sooner or later will all create soft porn..this is just the beginning.

But why do marketers do it?

The easy answer for this would be that digital allows us to measure everything, and that’s what marketers are chasing the ‘highest measurement' or metrics.

But as I said that’s an easy answer. It points to a larger issue which has been plaguing marketing for decades.

You see most marketers still believe in terms like ‘share of voice' or ‘engagement' . Our ways of measuring that have become more sophisticated but at the end of the day we want to focus on how many people watched an ad whether on television or youtube ,or heard a radio spot or clicked on a banner.

Attention was our currency and the best marketers were the ones who grabbed that for their brands.

This thought process made complete sense in 1980s but not really after that because when the number of television channels became more than a few, and the number of news platforms kept increasing and newspapers kept getting thicker with more ads, and then the infinite digital media and then mobile apps came along… it created an ecosystem where there were too many messages and too less attention.

And somehow we forgot to change the metrics.

We didn’t lie to ourselves of the reality ( marketers love sharing a version this image in events and conferences )

..but we forgot to ask the right questions.

We asked a more convenient question-

“How do I grab a consumers attention”

instead of a more relevant one

“ Is attention the primary metric we should be evaluating

Yes attention is important , but should it even be our primary or secondary objective?”

And the reason for not asking that often enough is simple..its far more difficult to understand your consumer , to help them understand your product or service is relevant to them. It’s much easier to just justify your job by getting high views and engagement on a piece of marketing content..irrespective of the fact that the content does nothing for your brand.

That’s the reason we still have marketing material where a celebrity or influencer is in an ad and people may even like the ad but still don’t know much about the product ; that we use skimpily dressed models to sell cars and even a better environment , ignoring the fact that the number of likes and comments signify the popularity of the model or the desperation of the men..not the car and definitely not the idea of doing something to save the environment. It’s also the reason why our inbox is flooded with mails and our roads and public walls with signboards because marketers are desperate enough that something will catch your attention.

And we can justify all of that.. ‘marketing’ because Share of voice' was high.

Even Linkedin which was supposed to be a professional platform has been reduced to ‘inspirational stories’ or funny anecdotes or thousands of people who seem to have interviewed the same candidate

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justingcgu_getchogrindup-activity-6719974426059907072-UgOJ

(If I was to share this article on Linkedin I would even add ‘please comment for better reach’)

And that’s because some crazy marketers have convinced people that reach, engagement , comments ought to be measured before context and value.

The way ahead a.k.a the solution

Instead of the primary objective being share of voice we need to primarily focus on what the voice is saying…the ‘quality of voice’. Because consumers don’t buy a product from the one who shouts the most but who gives the most relevant solution to their problem.

And frankly it’s not this is new ,it’s already been happening in bits and pieces ..

1. Thousands of tech startups have grown rapidly without focusing on getting more people to notice them instead saying ,and better doing something useful or relevant for customers ( ‘quality of voice’) and the customers so love the product or how it’s positioned that they go on to spread the word among thousands and then millions more. Think Dropbox, Slack to Apple iPhone.
2. It moved from tech startups to product companies like Tesla where instead of focussing on increasing their ‘share of voice' with ads they focus on the product and the ‘quality of voice' with the story of the product and the founder that literally consumers wait for months or years to get their product with zero marketing. They are now more valuable than all their competitors using celebrities or bikini clad models or sentimental ‘share of voice' ads

1. There are thousands of D2C companies launched in traditional retail sectors like grooming and food who are focussing more on the quality of the product and their unique voice rather than raising the volume of people talking about them. Ironically many of these companies have been started by marketers.
2. Finally , both on the advertising and client marketing side their have been a few changes. Advertising is losing on it’s own turf to consultancies who focus on asking the right questions rather than sticking to producing more marketing content.
3. On the brand side CMOs are steadily getting replaced by CGOs ( Chief Growth officer) who basically looks at the role of marketing in a more comprehensive manner. Or the role of the CEO or sales head is getting more broad to include major aspects of influencing consumer buying decision

We tend to view all of these including the growth of new trends like AI in making marketing more personalized, or growth hacking trying to alter the buying decision process as disparate innovations.

But in my view the end of the day it’s all connected to a failing marketing thought process which values numbers and gimmicks over context and value.

Unless we quickly dispel the notion that ‘share of voice’ and grabbing attention is the primary goal of marketing , we can keep shouting & sooner or later the consumer is going to walk out and we will remain shouting in the room.

The first signs of it are already there with adblocks ,streaming service without ads and only marketers talking about how a wonderful this campaign was.

The world of brands and consumers is definitely going to change ,what’s important to note is that whether the people who created brands will be part of that change.

Ps- Please comment for better reach 🙏 because content is no longer about sharing with the right audience but the views and comments it gets.