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 raised by the Institute’s Sponsors around Mental Availability/CEP strategy. Thank you to all who contributed.

Q:  If we try to link the brand to different CEP via our creatives, does it weaken our core positioning? And people don’t know anymore for what the brand stands for?

Ownership (Uniqueness) is very important for Distinctive Assets, the non-branding elements you want to own as triggers for the brand where ever they are present.  However ownership of a CEP is not possible or useful to have as an objective.  Bigger brands don’t have strong positions on single CEPs, they are known by more people as relevant in more buying contexts – which is why we recommend aiming for ‘wider, fresher, networks of CEPs’.  

Any CEP that is commonly used will have mental competition, the aim is not to avoid this messaging competition, but rather say the message in a way that is uniquely your brand (via Distinctive Assets). 

Q:  But do Category Entry Points not connect to each other? If you build one another one can be built to?

CEPs don’t compete with each other for retrieval, they are cues to retrieve brands, where each cue is a different doorway into the buyer memory.  It is therefore in the brand’s best interests to be an option behind as many doors as possible, across category buyers as well as for a single category buyer over time.

Q:  Does one CEP help to build another? i.e. Can you build the whole network from focusing in one specific area and allowing the brain to use abstract thought to “connect the dots”. Or do we need to focus on lots of different CEPs to effectively build the network? 

Unfortunately the ‘connect the dots’ type of thinking only happens for people who are motivated to do so, and remember each of the dots you want them to connect.  Both of those circumstances rarely happen.  Also remember you don’t need people to connect the CEPs with each other, they need to connect your brand to the CEPs.

Give people ‘the dots’ you want to connect in one execution: The brand and the message (CEP).  And over time, give people different executions to connect the brand to different CEPs.  When you need to refresh a past message you can either use a past execution with that message, or find a new way to say that message.  

Q:  Is it better to drive an important CEP that is competitive (driven by a lot of brands) or a niche CEP (white space)?

There are two types of competitiveness.  

General competitiveness – it is normal for common CEPs to attract more brands through natural repertoire expression.  This type of CEP is something that can be messaged, with the hope of gaining a mental advantage and that ist is common is a benefit over something that comes up rarely.   

Hyper-competitiveness – state where there are multiple brands with mental advantages due to past messaging.  This is a risk to message unless extremely strong branding is in place as the risk of advantaging competitors if branding is deficit in high.

The only times to message a low incidence CEP, even if no other brands have mental advantages are:

• When you have good reason to believe it will grow in incidence in the future
• It is a small part of the portfolio that other parts of the portfolio will not be able to service, and therefore grows penetration for the brand or company portfolio such as a gluten free option.
• There really are no alternative opportunities with higher incidence CEPs (although arguably expansion into another category or putting more resources back into the core brand or innovation might be a better use of the budget). 

Q:  As a small brand, is the path to growth best served by focusing on building a strong connection with 1 CEP, or building a breadth of linkages with relevant CEPs?

The answer is both.  In the short term, with any single execution, the aim is to build up links to a single CEP, but in the medium/longer term building up brand links a wider range of CEPs by rotating executions that cover different CEPs helps get the brand thought of by more people more often. 

Q:  Jenni just mentioned that once your brand is associated to a CEP there is no need to keep investing behind it, you already have it. Is there however a need to keep investing to some degree to sustain that mental connection of your brand to this CEP?

I think this is a misunderstanding.  There is always a role for refreshment of memories – it is just about when that is necessary and when the resources are best used elsewhere.  If your brand has a large (say 10pp or more) mental advantage on a CEP then you do not need to keep that CEP message in high rotation.  You can replace it with different messages over time knowing that memories will fade, but not immediately.  If over time the link reduces substantively (to say around 5pp), then you can reintroduce that message.  

Q:  If you have a strong mental advantage in a CEP should you continue to support that or diversify to focus on new opportunities

Having a strong mental advantage means you don’t have to communicate that CEP as often, and can aim to broaden the network by focusing on other priority CEPs.  The speed with which you need to return to it depends on the level of mental competition.  If many competitors also have a mental advantage on that CEP, you might need to return quicker than if you are the only or main brand with that CEP as a mental advantage.  if you have excellent creative for the same message, there might be greater benefits in running that than switching to a new, message, but more average creative.  This is something that needs more research.

Q:  Do CEPs change overtime? Or when should you look to perhaps refresh the CEP you focus on?

You should ideally have the ‘long shortlist’ of CEPs to build for each brand/sub-brand in the portfolio, so you are never just focusing on one CEP.  The CEPs can change over time, but this change is usually an evolution rather than radical shift.  

How you express a CEP can also change over time in line with societal changes.  For example think of the images for a CEP around ‘good for a wedding gift’.  The combination of people that you might choose to represent the couple getting married now would be very different than say in the 1980’s. 

Q:  What is your advice if you discover that 2 brands in a portfolio have relevance within the same CEP- but its a critical CEP to the category?

It’s perfectly fine to have two brands competing in a popular space.  The key thing is not to ‘hyper-compete’ and cannibalise each others sales.  This can be minimised by:

• Staggering messaging of that CEP, and not both promoting the same message at the same time
• Having very distinct brand identities so there is no brand confusion in advertising or in store

The question is however, is this a lost opportunity?  Both brands should have a few CEPs they are building and some of these should be only prioritised by one brand to give the portfolio wider CEP coverage.  If two brands share a mental advantage on a popular CEP then CEP building resources might be better spent on improving coverage, rather than reinforcing existing areas of overlap.   

The Duplication of Purchase Law and associated analysis (see Ehrenberg-Bass Sponsor reports #51 and #53) can check if you do have two portfolio members cannibalising each other.  This an additional step is useful to check if there is a CEP duplication problem that flows into buying behaviour. 

Q:  How do we think about / use CEP’s for innovation?

There might be CEPs that your company does not have anything buyable for e.g., there is a gluten free buyer and you don’t have the facilities to make gluten free products.  Realising the importance of this part of the market might steer the company to innovate to provide something buyable for that context. But this is more likely to be innovation that is new to the company rather than new to the world or even new to the category.  

You might also look at the common or growing CEPs and see if there are alternative ways to address these, which is an indirect way of using CEPs to help the innovation process.  This is where CEPs overlap with Jobs To Be Done, which is an explicit innovation framework.  Drawing on processes directly created for innovation and melding that with the knowledge gained via CEP research is how I would use CEPs for innovation purposes.

Q:  Do these principles apply to new category creation (vs old categories or otherwise)?

This is a good question, and not an area where we have conducted much research to date.  We have used our CEP identification and prioritisation approach to help a new brand entering into an existing category.  But not for a new category.   I imagine it could be adapted for this purpose but it has not been something anyone has asked us to do yet!

A key factor I would think carefully about is the competitive set.   This is likely to be a blend of options from old and new categories for many people, and so how this is handled will be very important for research quality and the longevity of results.

For further insights into Category Entry Points, please refer to the video of our Deep Dive session held in June 2021.