Binet and Field's research comes out of 996 campaigns entered into the IPA Effectiveness Awards between 1980 and 2010, nearly all of them built by agencies for national or multinational brands. A plumber running $1,500 a month on Facebook and Google is not in that dataset, and never will be. The question worth asking isn't whether their findings are true. It's which ones survive the trip down to a budget with three zeros instead of eight.
Some do, cleanly. Binet and Field found that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely as rational ones to produce the strongest tier of long-term profit growth, and that campaigns aimed at winning new customers produce roughly three times the business effects of campaigns aimed at keeping existing ones. Neither of those findings depends on scale. A feeling lands the same way whether the media budget behind it is $50,000 or $50 million. A new customer is still worth more to chase than a repeat one, whether you're a national insurer or a salon with two chairs.
The number everyone quotes doesn't mean what it sounds like.
Say the words "share of voice" to most marketers and they'll nod. Share of voice means something simple: the share of total advertising spend in your category that belongs to you, compared against your actual share of the market. Spend more than your market share and you tend to grow; spend less and you tend to shrink. It's the most cited number to come out of Binet and Field's work, which calls it one of the single most important drivers of long-term growth. A separate analysis by Danenberg, Kennedy, Beal and Sharp, cited in a piece on the 60/40 rule from Deep Marketing, puts a number on it: each 10 extra points of share of voice above your market share tracks with roughly half a point to three-quarters of a point of market share gain per year.
Here's where the math stops translating. Share of voice only means something in a category where voice is a measurable thing: a defined market, a known set of competitors, and ad spending that's tracked and comparable across them. National categories like car insurance or shampoo work this way. A hardware store on a four-block stretch of a mid-size town does not. Its real competition is two other hardware stores, a big-box chain that advertises nationally and locally in ways no local tool will ever capture, and a lot of quiet word of mouth that spends nothing on ads at all. There is no category-level ad spend to be a share of. This problem isn't unique to small businesses, either: even national advertisers are finding share of voice harder to measure, because digital media has fragmented to the point where not every platform's spending can be tracked or compared on equal terms, and attention itself varies wildly by platform depending on how easy it is to scroll past an ad.
Share of voice assumes a category where voice is something you can actually measure. A lot of small local markets don't have one. What matters instead is whether the ad fits the business behind it, which is why Knowing learns your business first and judges the ad second.
What share of voice is trying to protect, and why it still matters locally.
The idea underneath share of voice isn't really about accounting. It's about staying visible relative to whoever else is trying to be remembered by the same people. Tom Roach's compilation of Binet and Field's recurring charts shows the same pattern across years of IPA data: brands that keep showing up, in the channels that produce bigger brand effects, keep growing share; brands that go quiet lose it. That logic survives the trip to a small budget even when the measurement doesn't. A roofer who stops running ads for six months isn't losing "share of voice" in any measurable sense, but they are losing the thing share of voice was always a proxy for: being the name that comes to mind when someone's roof starts leaking.
A piece in Contagious, covering newer work from Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Rob Brittain, makes the point directly: if even a massive national ad market can't fully track its own share of voice anymore, a hardware store with a Facebook budget and no agency has no realistic way to either. The practical answer for an owner at that scale isn't to compute a ratio. Check your ad platform's reporting: are most households in your actual service area seeing the ad at least three or four times a month? If yes, you're doing locally what share of voice is meant to do at national scale.
A local HVAC company doesn't need a share-of-voice number against its two competitors. It needs to know that its ad reached most households in its service radius at least three or four times last month, which is a number any ad platform will actually report, and which does the same job share of voice does at national scale: making sure the business isn't invisible to the people who could hire it.
The brand-versus-performance split holds, with a smaller version of the same caveat.
Binet and Field also found that brands grow best when roughly 60 percent of ad budget goes to long-term brand building, meaning ads that make people remember and like the business, and 40 percent goes to short-term sales activation, meaning ads that push people to buy right now. That's the 60/40 rule, the second most quoted finding from this research, and it travels better than share of voice does, with one adjustment. Binet and Field's own follow-up work, described in the Deep Marketing piece, already moves the ratio depending on context: closer to 50/50 in online-first categories, 54:46 in B2B, and the split shifting further toward brand in categories with high customer loyalty. Ads designed to get an immediate sale never beat ads designed to build memory as the better long-term bet, in any sector they studied, but the exact ratio was never meant to be fixed.
At a small local budget, the practical version of this split isn't a brand campaign and a sales campaign running side by side with separate creative and separate measurement, the way a national advertiser might run it. It's usually one ad, doing a little of both at once: an ad that makes the business memorable while also giving someone a reason to call this month. The ratio question becomes a tone question. Does the ad only pitch a current promotion, or does it also leave an impression of who the business is and what it's like to work with? A business running only discount-driven, this-week-only ads is running the small-budget equivalent of pure sales activation with no brand building, and Binet and Field's finding, that this produces weaker long-term growth than a mix, still applies to it.
The implication for a budget with three zeros, not eight.
None of this means the research is irrelevant below a certain size. It means the parts of it built on feeling, memory, and who you're trying to reach travel intact, while the parts built on measuring a category's total ad spend need a category large enough to have one. A small business owner reading Binet and Field for guidance should borrow the instinct, not the formula: keep showing up, favor new customers over chasing the same ones twice, let the ad feel like something rather than just announce a price, and track how many people in the actual service area see the ad and how often, not a ratio against competitors nobody is tracking.
Frequently asked
Common questions.
Does the 60/40 rule apply to a small local business budget?
The underlying idea, splitting spend between long-term brand building and short-term sales pushes, still applies. The exact 60/40 ratio was always meant to shift by sector and context, per Binet and Field's own follow-up research, so a small business should treat it as a balance to maintain, not a fixed formula to copy.
Can a small business calculate its own share of voice?
Usually not meaningfully. Share of voice assumes a defined category with trackable total ad spending across competitors, which exists for national categories like insurance but rarely for a local service area. A better local substitute is tracking reach and frequency within the actual service radius.
Why do emotional ads outperform rational ones even for small businesses?
Binet and Field's analysis of IPA-winning campaigns found emotional campaigns nearly twice as likely to produce the strongest tier of long-term profit growth. That effect comes from memorability and feeling, not from spend scale, so it applies to a two-location shop as much as a national brand.