We know from a huge body of research by Professor John Philip Jones, as well as by Millward Brown and others, that, all other things being equal, a brand that spends above its par share of voice, that is, a larger percentage than its brand share, should increase its market share. The opposite is also true, of course: Those brands that spend less than their par share are likely to decline. Given that in many markets most brands spend in line with their share and do not take an investment stance by spending ahead of it, nor employ above averagely effective creative work, it follows that few brands achieve notable growth.

So the first lesson of brand health?the backdrop to all the other life-enhancing brand behaviours?is a very straightforward one. The sobering truth of marketing is that, broadly speaking, what you get back in terms of market share growth is related to what you put in in terms of share of voice (SOV). This is defined as the brand?s percentage share of all the marketing communications (marcoms) delivered by all the brands in the market category. Clearly, there is a measurement issue in terms of capturing all marcoms deployed by brands, hence most calculations of SOV are based upon main media advertising expenditure as recorded by the likes of Nielsen Media, the broad assumption being that this is pro rata to the other monies being spent across the many other channels available, including sales promotion, direct marketing and public relations. There are various ways of setting a communications budget for a brand, but several of them tend to lead to an investment level broadly in line with the brand?s share of market (SOM). So communications budgets for brands are often set to deliver an SOV equal to their SOM. However, the driving force of share growth is the difference between SOV and share of market (SOV?SOM). Share growth is proportional to this difference in an apparently straightforward way. In fact it is slightly more complicated than this because bigger brands can get away with a lower share of voice, as John Philip Jones has shown.

And, of course, truly outstanding marketing and creativity in commercial communications can help beat the odds imposed by a below-par media budget.

Therefore, the first and most obvious factor to influence a brand?s health is whether its SOV is smaller than its market share: If it is smaller and if the brand is not the brand leader, then it is more than likely to be in decline. At the very least it will need to deploy the full range of other life-enhancing behaviours (that follow) to offset its underinvestment in SOV and hopefully help it hang on in there. But for most brands in most situations, if they are not investing adequately in marketing share of voice then the future doesn?t look bright.

The oft-quoted exception to this rule?Google?achieved its ?share of voice? in ways other than using paid-for media, but for many very obvious reasons will remain atypical of the vast majority of brands. According to Les Binet, the implications of the relationship between SOV and growth are widely misunderstood by marketers with brand life-threatening results: I think that most clients think that if you have sustained advertising you have sustained growth. When I ask the question of clients ?what happens if you keep advertising??, about two-thirds of them will say, ?well, it keeps the demand growing?, so they?re surprised when this doesn?t happen. They tend to think it?s easy to justify expenditure in the launch phase of a brand?s career because they know you?ve got to invest in the brand to break into the market and you see really obvious paybacks, you see strong growth, so everyone feels happy. But later on it becomes much harder to justify continued expenditure because it looks like you?re not getting anything back, and so it?s very tempting at this point to start cutting the marketing budget.

People are constantly looking for growth in profit and the obvious thing to do at this point is to say, ?well, we don?t seem to be able to create any more demand, so the thing to do is to cut out the cost side of the business. Advertising is a cost, so we?ll reduce it?. But when you reduce marketing expenditure what happens is you only get decay. And then when you?ve got a declining brand it?s actually even harder to justify expenditure. Because people say, ?well, we?re in the declining phase, we?ll just treat it as a cash cow? and that?s how brands die. They don?t realise that the true RoI is not the change in profit, it?s the difference between your profit as it was and as it would be. (Les Binet, European Director, DDB Matrix)There are some other important observations that are not necessarily immediately obvious at first glance. The first is that the gradient of the line is twice as steep as other researchers have shown to be the case for ?ordinary? campaigns and brands. Correcting for this leads you to the same conclusion as others: That as a rough rule of thumb you need SOV to exceed SOM by 10 percentage points for every point of annual SOM growth you wish to achieve. But no brand manager can afford to assume they will achieve these high levels of effectiveness, so the rule of thumb is a sensible guide for all brands.

The second observation is that while the data correlation is good, statistically speaking, there are nevertheless a fair number of cases (points on the chart) that have beaten the ?law of returns? line by a considerable margin. It turns out that the major common factor among what are otherwise a very diverse group of cases is that they were mostly cases where there was major change to the marketing mix: Typically a brand extension or a complete brand relaunch, or alternatively the case was a brand launch. In such cases there is significant ?news? and other interest for the consumer, and not just new information but novel ideas and representations too. This makes campaigns work harder and is one of many reasons why innovation is good for brands.

Clearly, it is in the interests of brands to reinvent themselves in some way from time to time: Consistency of brand vision may be a good thing, but this is not necessarily true of the way that vision is expressed to consumers. The human brain has been attuned by Darwinian evolution to notice change at both conscious and sub-conscious levels because it can be life-threatening or advantageous. Thus relevant innovation can be very effective in lodging in our brains, helping to reinforce the brand promise and its saliency.

So innovation is rightly at the top of most marketers? brand agendas. And a survey in 2007 of CMOs? use of innovation-related marketing strategies, published by Advertising Age, revealed that line extensions (a particular type of brand extension) are the key innovation strategies in use to meet next year?s goals. But the whole area of brand extension is a complex one and failure rates are famously high at over 90% (also according to Advertising Age). So this key stepping-stone to brand immortality is fraught with risk and danger.

?Reprinted with permission from Viva Books

Book: Brand Immortality

Authors: Hamish Pringle and Peter Field

Price: Rs 450