Not with bigger budgets, but by creating disproportionate desire.
The Ipsos team behind this conclusion analysed 3 years of household purchases data across 430+ brands with Ipsos survey-based Brand Desire, a concise equity metric showing how much consumers want a brand relative to alternatives.
What they found? A roadmap for small & challenger brands to grow based on equity and driving Excess Consumer Demand, rather than chasing Excess Share of Voice like big brands do.
Here are my key takeaways from “The Excess Factor” publication (written by Laurent Dumouchel & Emmanuel Probst):
KEY TAKEAWAY #1:
When people want you more than your footprint suggests, meaning the brand holds excess consumer demand or equity, sales catch up. When they want you less, sales decline:
- The link between excess demand today and sales growth tomorrow is direct: across all the cases studied, brands with excess equity grew sales by about 3.6% in the subsequent year while those with a deficit declined 5.2%
- Key question: Is your brand desire higher than your current share? Is that gap growing or narrowing?
KEY TAKEAWAY #2:
For smaller brands, excess equity effectively converts latent fandom into rapid, compounding growth:
- Small brands start with a penetration handicap: 5% household penetration over 12 months vs 29% or more for big brands
- But the small brands in the top 20% with excess equity deliver value sales growth of around 16.6% in the following year. Big brands with excess equity still grow but more slowly as they are near saturation level.
- Key question: How can small brands generate demand disproportionate to their actual market share?
KEY TAKEAWAY #3:
Achieving excess equity is not only a matter of budget, like share of voice. It requires a multi-faceted approach:
- Being chosen by MORE PEOPLE by building unforgettable visibility; usually by focusing on a core, well-defined, niche audience or demand space and by building an engaged user base before searching for scale and massive reach
- Being chosen MORE OFTEN by closing the closeness gap: Building different emotional connections through distinctive and empathetic experiences
- Being chosen MORE EASILY by developing strategic accessibility; owning specific contexts and consumption moments, securing must-win points of presence in your category (like store checkouts for example), developing repeat purchases through subscriptions.
AND WHAT IF YOU’RE A LEADING BRAND?
Desire should remain your true north too! And desire is not only a matter of spend and share of voice.
As for couples, learn to renew your desirability… and don’t shy away from taking inspiration from small brands!
Source: the full publication can be downloaded on the Ipsos website.