Introduction
Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the thoughts that people have when they transition from being a just an everyday person, not thinking about the category to a category buyer who is now thinking about the category. These CEP thoughts act as retrieval cues to shape the options that are mentally available to buy at that time.
This article deals with questions raised by the Institute’s Sponsors specifically about how to define and explain CEPs. Thank you to all who contributed.
Q: Can you provide examples of Category Entry Points?
One category we explored for our R&D is Social Media. We conducted research to identify CEPs in Social Media and then mapped them against category user lives and brands in the category in two surveys conducted in the USA.
Examples of CEPs in the category of Social Media include: Good for gaming activities; When I want a quick response; and Good to keep up with co-workers/colleagues lives.
Every category has its own CEPs, the key thing is to ensure you are not defining them too narrowly. This is where the framework of the W’s can be useful. By exploring how category buyers are influenced by the When, Where, Why, While, with/for Whom, with What, and hoW feeling reminds us of all the different sources of CEPs and stops us being too narrowly focused on just one or two areas.
Q: How does a CEP approach compare to other approaches such as Jobs to be done, need states, demand states, consumption occasions? (Combined question)
A number of questions that asked how a CEP approach compares to other frameworks/approaches. It is difficult to assess against any one single approach without the detail on measurement and implementation.
Here are three key areas that you can use to assess the value of any approach. I will explain these from a CEP perspective and highlight some of the major differences with other approaches. You can then ask proponents of other ideas these questions and compare the responses.
- The fundamental idea
- The measurement/data collection approach
- The analysis/conclusions drawn
The fundamental idea
Our CEP approach applies two fundamental areas of knowledge:
- How brands grow, and the laws of growth that underpin this knowledge, and
- How memory works, and in particular how category buyers use memories in buying situations.
In particular CEPs highlight the diversity of the retrieval cues people use to access memory. This means need states are a subset of CEPs (typically these are Why CEPs), as are consumption occasions, but only to the extent that thoughts of the consumption occasion shape the options to buy. For example if I am buying a drink to serve at a family dinner, I might think of the family members and/or I might think about the food I am going to serve it with when evoking options to buy.
One strengths of a CEP approach is that it does not say any one particular type of CEP is ‘better’ than any other (e.g., internal motives are more important than environmental influences, or that people are more influential than the weather), but seeks to identify potential CEPs from as wider range of sources as possible. That most valuable CEPs often come from a wide range of CEP types.
The measurement/data collection approach
When collecting data, there are several strengths of our CEP approach that helps get more comprehensive information:
- Separating out the identification from prioritisation stage which allows us to select the most useful sample structure to identify CEPs without compromising the generalisability needed for the prioritisation stage. This makes for more efficient and effective research.
- Using a time frame that allows for possibility of multiple purchase occasions from each category buyer, to capture individual level use of different CEPs. This helps avoid pigeon holing people into their last buying experience only.
- Using a free choice, pick any method that prompts for brands lists to get links between brands and CEPs in an approach that mimics the structure of memory (as opposed to scales) but not suffer from measurement issues that come from repeated unprompted measures such as inhibition/priming effects.
The conclusions drawn
Our CEP approach takes into account how brands grow and that bigger brands have wider, fresher CEP networks.
The conclusions also take into account the three forces that define any one brand’s opportunities:
- The category buyers, and how CEPs feature in their lives (how common?);
- The brand and its history which define which CEPs might be unnecessary or unwise (how credible?); and
- The competitors’ current mental advantages (how competitive?)
Therefore the findings are geared to identifying multiple opportunities to be harnessed over the long term, rather than artificially manufacturing a single ‘silver bullet’ solution. This makes the findings grounded in the real world that have longevity.
Q: Are CEPs recurring or can they be one-off lifetime events e.g. having a baby for diapers?
CEPs can be recurring or one-off events, or even both (at the same time for different people). Some people will only have one baby, others will have five. But even if having a baby brings you into the diaper/nappy category, there are going to be other CEPs, recurring more often, that shape buying within the category.
How you shape the CEP with wording can influence the frequency category buyers will encounter it. If you are (unnecessarily) specific in your CEP definition, you limit the frequency of occurrence both for an individual and for category buyers in general. For example, you can have a CEP of ‘need something for grandfathers’ 75th birthday’ which is a very narrowly defined CEP that won’t occur often. However this could be broadened to ‘any grandfather birthday’ which broadens the age or even ‘any birthday’ which broadens the recipient or even ‘a gift’ which broadens the gifting event.
While some narrowing might be necessary because it leads to radically different options evoked (e.g., Grandfather’s gift versus gift for your mother), watch out for excessive narrowing as it makes the job of prioritising CEPs more difficult.
Q: Do I understand correctly that CEPs can be different for different brands in one category?
CEPs are first and foremost drawn from buyer lives. Brands can shape this through large scale advertising that might heighten the salience for a specific CEP, but we don’t see this happening very often. This means that CEPs in themselves do not vary for brands in a category.
However every brand in a category brings its own history of advertised messages, and so this means the priority CEPs for two brands within a the same category might differ.
If you have more than one brand in the same category, it is also advantageous to think about how to use both to maximise coverage of CEPs, so it is in the company’s overall interest for them to prioritise different CEPs.
Q: Can a premium price point or product be CEP?
Pricing or product decisions are made by the company, which means they are not CEPs in themselves, but they are design inputs the company uses to provide something buyable in specific CEP contexts. For example if ‘treating yourself or others’ is a CEP for a category, then a higher priced/high quality option might be sought in this context.
One of the challenges is recognising when being strong in one CEP might be a disadvantage in other, desirable parts of the category. For example, if known as ‘an indulgent treat’ in a category where this is (by its nature) infrequently encountered, can limit the ROI for messaging that CEP. We can identify this when we examine CEP incidence and frequency. These CEPs have a lower frequency for their incidence level, which makes them less valuable for their incidence than a CEP that has a more typical frequency.
For further insights into Category Entry Points, please refer to the video of our Deep Dive session held in June 2021.
