mindshare

The other day, I was sharing with a friend how I approach business problems. I explained that the first thing I do is try to build a really big picture view of the business. What industry is the business in? What are all the ways the business makes money? Who are the business’ customers? Who are the business’ competitors? What is the customer experience like across the customer lifecycle? What are the different levers in the business model? Which are the biggest levers and where are there interdependencies? What are the highest priorities for the business?

This got us into a conversation about success metrics.

If you plan to recommend a solution to a business executive, it really helps to have concrete and demonstrable objectives. Are you going to increase revenue share, market share, mindshare, or something else?

“What’s mindshare?”

Good question. The idea of share assumes that there are finite resources in a given market.

There’s a limited amount of money that a market or customer will spend on products like your product. The percent of the customer’s budget that you get versus your competition is your revenue share.

There’s a limited number of customers in your total addressable market, the people or entities capable of and likely to buy your product. What percent of customers are using your product to meet the needs that could be met with your competitors’ products? That’s your market share.

The idea of mindshare suggests that there’s a limit to how many brands or products a customer will bother to consider or is even capable of keeping in mind. When a brand is top of mind, they often get credit for ‘thought leadership’. Brand loyalty and customer satisfaction are measureable facets of mindshare.

It’s also important to understand the qualitative measures associated with share. If your brand is top of mind for negative reasons, it won’t do much for your business’ bottom line.

It would be ideal if you had some idea of how the business is tracking against existing metrics, and by how much you would need to change your numbers before you achieved success with a proposed solution.

I hope that helps.

How are you defining share? What metrics are you using to make decisions?