How to measure and master mindshare (64.732Kb) - DOWNLOAD

Look where you will, and you will find that products, technology and brands are becoming less differentiated and more commoditised. In this new world, strong, committed routes to market are increasingly important. 
 
The degree to which a company like Cisco, Sony or McDonalds has real mindshare with its intermediaries goes a long way to determining its stock market price.  Put simply, partners who believe and trust your company, will sell more product and invest more in their long-term relationship with you. 

Unfortunately, the fog settles when companies attempt to measure this mindshare.

Mindshare expresses itself very clearly in sales performance.

Typically, it gets very foggy indeed when companies start to analyse what specific steps they need to take to increase the things, such as trust and commitment, which make up mindshare.

Intermittent channel satisfaction surveys generally tell you little you didn’t know already.  Nor do they tell you what steps you should take next. This is because they do not predict the future behaviour of your intermediaries.  Indeed, surprisingly, there is little correlation at all between channel satisfaction levels and how likely an intermediary is to defect or sell more product.  Thomas Jones and Earl Sasser showed this in their famous article "Why satisfied customers defect" (Harvard Business Review, November 1995). 

Measuring mindshare is a new way to disperse the miasma. It is based on my doctoral thesis and has been tested and put into action through several large surveys of Xerox’s Pan-European channels.

This article describes the thinking behind this approach.  It then goes on to look at the benefits which accrue from using it.

Channel mindshare is a measurement of the strength of a relationship in terms of trust, commitment and cooperation. There is a strong and proven correlation between mindshare levels and how willing an intermediary is to place one brand in front of another.  Or how likely the intermediary is to defect. Mindshare also expresses itself very clearly in sales performance. Intermediaries who have high mindshare will, typically, sell more than those with low mindshare. In other words, unlike channel satisfaction, it is predictive. 

Using the techniques described here, you can map how much mindshare you really have with intermediaries, analyse where and how you need to strengthen it, and form an estimate of the likely payback.

Conceptually, this model breaks mindshare down into three drivers – firstly, commitment and trust; secondly, collaboration; and, thirdly, mutuality of interest and common purpose.  Good mindshare is going to depend upon scoring well across the board. For example, you probably know of suppliers who are good communicators, but are not trusted.

As well as these three mindshare drivers there is a fourth we need to measure – product, brand and profit.  This measures the perceived attractiveness of the supplier’s product offering to the intermediary.  Think of this as the hygiene driver. Broadly speaking, your performance here needs to be as good as the competition for you to garner the full benefit from strong mindshare.