Introduction
Category Entry Points are the thoughts that people have when they transition from being a person to a category buyer at that point in time. These thoughts act as retrieval cues that shape the options that are mentally available to buy at that time.
This article deals with questions the Institute’s Sponsors raised around Category Entry Point measurement and metrics. Thank you to all who contributed.
Q: What is the suggested/proper way of asking CEPs in a brand tracking questionnaire: Showing the statement one by one, then ask which brand(s) respondents associate with, or the other way around – showing the brand one by one, then ask which statements do they associate each brand with?
The recommended approach is to provide the CEP (as the ‘cue’) and a list of brands (for the ‘response’), and ask which brands, if any, do you link to that CEP. Then move onto the next CEP.
Our testing shows that if you ask with the brand as the ‘cue’ and then have a list of CEPs as the ‘response’ to choose from, you get fewer linkages than if you go from CEP as the ‘cue’ to brand list. This means you miss more information using the brand as the ‘cue’.
Q: If Mental Availability is about the brand ‘coming to mind’ why don’t you recommend an unprompted measurement approach?
While we try to mimic real life situations in measurement, there are some practicalities of measurement that differ from that in the real world. This means adjustments can be necessary. It is important to ensure that these adjustments improve rather than hamper the quality of information.
In the ‘real world’, a person uses a CEP at a point in time and then goes about their lives. There is often a considerable lapse of time before they need to delve into that part of their memory again for retrieval.
In the ‘measurement world’, we ask people multiple CEPs often in quick succession. There is no opportunity for the people to ‘clear’ their working memory before the next CEP. This means the brands linked to the first CEP have an advantage for the CEPs that follow and other brands are disadvantaged. Therefore if you measure multiple CEPs unprompted over time, the brand responses get fewer and biased to bigger brands. In particular you reduce the chance of getting responses about small brands and from any brand’s non-buyers, who are particularly important to understand for growth.
Q: Usually, how many CEPs could be measured for one category or one brand on average? Is there any limitations in the number of linkages?
If you follow our recommended approach then we implement a limit of 35 CEPs in B2C categories and try to get this down to under 30 CEPs for B2B categories. This is for strategy setting research where you are prioritising CEPs. When tracking over time, it is possible, and indeed sensible, to reduce the list much further.
The number of brands measured also adds to the complexity for the respondent, so that needs to be taken into account as well.
Q: I’m surprised to see so much attitudinal questioning when you’ve said for so long that attitudes don’t predict behaviour. So my question is are these metrics predictive of market performance? Or are they lagging metrics?
Attitudes are overall evaluations of (usually) brands. They are typically formed after a behaviour has occurred. Its hard to form an attitude about something that you have not experienced, which is why they rarely predict first purchase. But after a brand is bought, people can form an evaluation of the brand.
CEPs are not attitudes. CEPs are associations that can be used as retrieval cues. There is multi-category evidence that:
- Different cues retrieve different sets of brands – this tells us a multi-cue approach is needed in management and in measurement.
- Bigger brands have more linkages to more CEPs than smaller brands – this tells us more CEPs are better than fewer CEPs.
- The number of attributes has a stronger relationship with future behaviour than any individual attribute – this tells us that more CEPs is more important than any one CEP, but each CEP is a building block to get to more CEPs.
It is important to remember that Physical Availability has the potential to interfere with the direct relationship between Mental Availability and sales. However looking for anomalies between Mental Availability and sales can help identify issues with Physical Availability.
Q: Should these be tracked regularly? Or just an occasional dip?
It depends what you mean by ‘tracked regularly’. There is really no viable case for week-by-week small sample brand health data collection where data gets rolled up into quarterly results. That is a by-product of a time of pools of interviewers collecting data, who had limits on how many surveys they could conduct, and this approach helped to provide stable ongoing employment for the workforce to retain quality interviewers.
Now much of tracking research is online, a ‘dip’ is the most useful approach as it measures the whole sample at the same time and allows a full assessment of the cumulation of your marketing activities versus competitors for every brand health goal you aim to achieve. This includes Mental Availability and CEPs.
The frequency of the ‘dip’ will depend on the level of advertising and category purchase frequency, as they speak to the likelihood of change in the time period. But very few categories need to be tracked more than six monthly and most can be annual.
Frequent tracking is often used as a mechanism to work out if specific marketing activities had an impact on category buyers. This can be replaced with better screening and testing mechanisms to make sure every piece of marketing activity has the ingredients (branding, clear messaging, wide reach media plan) to give it the best chance of success.
Q: Is Mental Market Share another name for salience?
Salience refers to the situational specific retrieval of the brand, whether it comes to mind in a specific situation. Mental Market Share, which is a measure of Mental Availability, aims to capture the propensity of a brand to come to mind across the broader range of category contexts. The levers that underpin this are:
- How many people can think of the brand (Mental Penetration).
- How many contexts these people are likely to think of the brand (Network Size).
- Relative to how often competitors are thought of (Share of Mind).
Q: How Mental Market Share translates into Share of Market?
There are parallels. Mental Market Share is a product of how many people think of the brand, how often they think of the brand, relative to how often competitors are thought of. Share of Market is a product of how many people buy the brand, how often, relative to how often competitors are bought.
However whether people buy depends not just on Mental Availability but also depends on the quality of Physical Availability, which can disrupt or facilitate the flow from Mental Availability to buying.
Q: What do you think about metrics like consideration, preference, willingness to pay etc. as indicators of growth and performance?
There are many question marks over these measures, but the onus is on proponents of these metrics to establish any worth. Ask for the evidence. It is important to remember that there is no sliver bullet one size fits all metric, that works for all brands in all situations. Contexts change, such as in the brands, buyers and marketing activities, and the metrics that matter also should adapt to the context.
Q: When Category Entry Points turn to be ’emotional/deeper’ do you think that they have a good chance to be picked by people in a traditional survey ?
For an emotion to become a CEP that can be measured in a survey, it needs to be articulated into words that can become a retrieval cue. If it is truly hidden/unconscious then a traditional survey will not capture it. However most CEPs are not deep secrets, but rather ‘thought highways’ that people quickly travel down to generate potential options to buy.
Q: As CEPs are here-and-now, how often should you revisit your list of CEPs?
While CEPs are about the here-and-now, that doesn’t mean they are short-lived. The structure of buyer lives are remarkably robust in the face of change. When we have new ways of operating in a category, we typically add this to our portfolio of behaviour rather than totally switch. Changes in buyer lives are gradual rather than dramatic and changes in CEPs, which reflect buyer lives, tend to also be gradual rather than dramatic.
That doesn’t mean change in CEP occurence doesn’t happen. We recommend checking incidence of CEPs every two or three years and repeating the CEP identification stage every five years to check you still have the right list and priorities.
Q: I’m unclear on why a superiority message doesn’t work for light buyers or non users, can you explain why?
There is a difference between a ‘superiority message’ and a ‘superiority wording’ measurement approach. I was referring to a superiority wording measurement approach.
A ‘superiority wording’ measurement approach (discussed in the Q&A session) is about the wording of an attribute (including CEPs), such as ‘The best drink for kids’. This approach is not recommended because it elicits fewer brands than a similar idea not worded as extremely, such as ‘A good drink to give kids’. The people you miss responses from also tend to be light/non-brand buyers. Therefore your capacity to get brand linkages to the CEP, from people who are important for growth, are reduced with this wording.
Q: Are there any research agencies that you know that are measuring Mental Availability metrics (i.e., MMS, Mpen, NS, SOM) on going basis (a-la brand health tracking or retail audit) and not through bespoke research?
Not that I know of. We have not been approached by any major agency seeking to use our approach to talk about training and licensing, and therefore cannot endorse any other agencies.
The measures are publicly available for anyone who wants to use them, but there is a quite a bit of background knowledge needed to use them well. Therefore I recommend that even if someone uses the same metrics, check they do understand the background to them and have read the appropriate literature (not just How Brands Grow Part 2, but the background papers too).
However the larger research agencies that claim to measure Mental Availability have usually tried to adapt their proprietary model to fit into our Mental Availability framework. The ones I have seen are flawed in either concept, measure or interpretation.
To fill the gap in the market, at the Institute we created processes for CEP identification and prioritisation research and can conduct this for anyone in any category where we can recruit appropriate samples.
We can also advise on set up for ongoing tracking and, if necessary, conduct that tracking. Our approach does not require or recommend frequent tracking.
For further insights into Category Entry Points, please refer to the video of our Deep Dive session held in June 2021.
