There is a large chorus out there extolling marketers to keep advertising in an economic downturn.  This short article focuses instead on how to do the advertising, specifically what to change and what to keep consistent in order to get the most value from those advertising dollars.

To this end, we suggest a review of your CEPs to assess potential changes on two dimensions:  incidence and context.  This will help evolve your messaging strategy (if necessary) to meet the conditions of the day, without compromising the brand’s longer term Mental Availability building efforts.

Introduction

The advent of COVID-19 means lives have changed for many people.  Stay at home orders, restricted social interactions, business closures, and income loss for many category buyers.  But people are still eating, drinking, cleaning and entertaining themselves even in these difficult and different environments. While some categories such as travel, have been decimated, other categories are thriving, and many are at least surviving.  In these thriving and surviving categories, brands still compete with each other for attention, and sales, from category buyers.  

This piece is for marketers working in categories that are still being bought/consumed/used.  The aim is to help you determine if/how to adapt a Category Entry Point strategy to better shape the messaging of your brand to meet the challenges of the coming months.

Category Entry Points

Category Entry Points (CEPs) refers to the thoughts people have at the times when they transition into being a category buyer, and therefore a potential brand buyer.  CEPs come from both the buyer’s internal feelings and motivations, and their external environment.  As both the internal and external worlds of category buyers have been changed by COVID-19, we might expect category buyers’ experiences with at least some CEPs to have also changed.

To remind us of the broad range of CEP sources, we use the W’s to classify CEPs:  Why, When, While, Where, with/for Whom, with What and hoW feeling.  There are two major ways CEPs can be affected in a COVID-19 world:

• CEP incidence – how often category buyers encounter CEPs can increase or decrease.  A change in incidence can change the value of a CEP as a message at this time.  
• CEP context – how category buyers experience the CEP can change. This means creative might need to be adapted to speak to the moment or avoid appearing obviously out-of-touch, and the negative publicity that might arise from that.  

Changes to some W’s are more obvious, such as:

• ‘Where’ CEPs that are centred around the home will likely have higher incidence, while ones that are located out of home will likely have lower incidence.
• ‘With/for Whom’ CEPs that are centred around immediate family or alone will likely have higher incidence while those about socialising in large groups will likely be of lower incidence.

However to fully understand what might change and what is likely to remain the same, it would be timely to review the category’s CEPs, and your brand’s priority CEPs, to check there is a match between the short/medium term future and the memory structures the brand is building.  

The Exercise

This is a CEP assessment exercise that you can quite quickly do with your team.  Having multiple people do it independently is a useful check on individual biases.  Take a category’s CEP list and to identify potential changes, ask these questions: 

Q1:  Is the incidence of category buyers encountering the CEP likely to go up, down or remain unchanged?  

Q2:  How might the context in which category buyers experience the CEP change given social distancing and other societal and work environment changes?

This initial assessment of possible changes can then be a springboard to deciding if anything needs further investigation.  For example if a major decline in incidence or change in context is expected for a brand’s priority CEP, and this CEP is the subject of a current or anticipated advertising campaign, you can then act on that. 

We recommend doing this for all CEPs in the category, not just the CEPs that are identified as priorities for your brand/portfolio.  As a refresher, or background for those unfamiliar with our CEP work, a brand’s long list of usually 6-8 priority CEPs are determined by a combination of:

(a) how commonly a CEP is encountered; 

(b) the credibility of the CEP is as a message for that brand/portfolio; and 

(c) the CEP’s level of mental competition. 

As COVID-19 could affect (a), it may lead you to consider a lower incidence CEP that was not initially in a brand’s priority list as a potential messaging option in the short/medium term. 

However before radically changing a brand’s CEP messaging strategy, by adopting a lower incidence CEP as a primary message, we recommend doing some external validation on the changes in incidence numbers.  It is easy to assume the changes we experience in our lives have much greater impact on our category buying than is actually experienced.  Something like an incidence poll of the CEPs would provide objective evidence to you and others, to support any change in messaging strategy. 

Any new adoption of a CEP to message is still, of course, subject to (b), that the previously non-priority CEP is something your brand can say and (c), that it is not subject to extremely high mental competition.  

An Example

Here is an example using some of the coffee CEPs from our R&D (some of you might have seen this as an example in our Mental Availability Seminar) (see Table 1).   

Table 1:  Example of an assessment of CEPs for Coffee in light of COVID-19

Wrap-up

This is a difficult time, and the ability to separate out where to change/adapt and where to remain consistent will be a factor in any brand’s success in navigating these waters.  With CEPs there is not a ‘one size fits all’ recommendation.  The stability/adaption ratio is likely to change depending on the category and the environmental changes your category buyer is experiencing – something you need to review in each market you operate.