What are category entry points?

Category entry points (CEPs) focus on the buyer – not the brand. But marketers can harness these consumer entryways to drive successful brand strategy.

Before a buyer thinks about your brand – or any brand – a buying trigger or ‘cue’ must occur. That might be “I’ve spilled something on my shirt and I need to get the stain out” or “I’m hungry but I haven’t got much time” or “my skin feels dry.”

For Mini MBA, research shows this is most often: “I’ve got a s**t job and I need a career change” or “I’ve had a career change and I need training” – as eloquently paraphrased by Professor Mark Ritson.

Only then will the buyer access their memory bank to retrieve a shortlist of brands that can attend that need or occasion.

People don’t sit around thinking about brands – they’ve got much more important things to do. Equally, they don’t have the time or interest to eke out a long list of brands who might be up for the job.

At this point, a brand that is easily recalled and easy to buy is the brand that usually gets bought. Behold a very simple summary of Category Entry Points, Mental Availability and Physical Availability.

To recap:

• • Category Entry Points (CEPs) – an internal or external cue that triggers buying behaviour (i.e. what causes a buyer to enter the category)
  • Mental Availability – how easily the brand is recalled in a buying situation
  • Physical Availability – how easy the brand is to buy or access

These ideas are brought to us by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – chiefly Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp via truckloads of published research and books including How Brands Grow part 1 & 2, Building Distinctive Brand Assets and Better Brand Health.

The reason category entry points matter in an Ehrenberg-Bass world is that they provide opportunities to build mental availability for your brand. They are, famously, the ‘building blocks of mental availability.’

A brand’s level of mental availability is essentially a measure of how likely that brand will be thought of, or easily recognised, in buying situations. This is the chief goal of the marketer, according to Ehrenberg-Bass.

Marketers drive high mental availability by linking their brand to the CEPs that are bringing buyers into the category. The stronger that brand link becomes, the more likely it will spring to mind when a buyer encounters the CEP.

Together with ‘distinctive brand assets’ (aka brand codes), this builds a mental shortcut in the minds of consumers so that the brand is easily thought of and quickly recognised when they next enter the category.

High mental availability plus good physical availability results in more sales. This, they say, is how brands grow.

How do CEPs work as part of a wider marketing strategy?

There may be some differences in terminology and a few minor sticking points (watch Mark Ritson: ‘Defending Differentiation’) but the work of Ehrenberg-Bass is largely complementary to the world of strategic marketing and Mini MBA.

For starters, category entry points are a useful way to think about brand because they force a level of market orientation. You are inherently viewing things through the eyes of buyers, rather than looking out at the market from inside your organisation.

A brand can signal what they want to say about themselves to the world by their positioning, but it is the category buyer who determines the CEP. The humbling fact is CEPs exist with or without your brand.

It’s up to brands to find the most common – and therefore valuable – CEPs through market research, then decide if and how that will impact strategy.

The humbling fact is CEPs exist with or without your brand

Naturally, the most common use of category entry points is in brand positioning. Understanding the CEPs in your category means that marketers can capitalise on them in their own positioning. KitKat’s near-monopoly on the category entry point ‘having a break’ is probably the most famous example of this.

But as ever, the Ritson bothist approach takes CEPs as a tool, not a regime. You can absolutely build a strategy around ‘owning’ category entry points, but not every brand can afford the mass marketing spend required to play the mental availability game. And for those big brands who are in the race, why not further improve your odds with differentiated, two-speed campaigns? “Be greedy,” as Mark says.

CEPs also feed nicely into many other parts of the marketing journey. Category entry points work well as a rung on the benefit ladder, especially for targeted campaigns – e.g. back to school, a break from Christmas shopping, having the house to myself…etc.

Uber Eats taps into the latter as an occasion for ordering a bottle of wine via the food delivery app:

When it comes to the all-important purchase funnel, Mark Ritson proposes a custom funnel that puts category entry points at the top in place of awareness. It might look something like this:

Proportion of your market that experiences that category entry point
Salience of your brand for that category entry point (mental availability)
Preference
Purchase once
Purchase many times
NPS

–  Mini MBA in Brand Management Q&A* (Jun ‘24)

In terms of brand tracking, CEP associations give us a more customer-first metric versus the familiar brand-focussed measures like unaided awareness, awareness and even preference.

Asking consumers ‘have you heard of our brand?’ is “very brand first, customer second,” says Mark Ritson. “Whereas if I say: ‘you’ve got a need, now which brands come to mind?’ it’s more market driven.” – Mini MBA in Marketing Q&A* (Oct ‘22)

it’s more market driven

That doesn’t mean marketers ought to abandon all else to CEP associations. Brand awareness is an important metric – buyers need to know your brand to buy your brand. Category entry points won’t be the right tool for every brand or situation. Brands may choose to track both CEPs and traditional metrics and see what generates the most insight.

How you use category points is up to you and will likely depend on the size of your brand, your budget, objectives and other factors both inside and outside of your control. But understanding more about how customers are coming into your category is an important part of the puzzle.

Cover image: Pavlovska Yevheniia/shutterstock.com

 

*Q&As with Mark Ritson

Biweekly Q&As are a key part of the Mini MBA in Marketing, Mini MBA in Brand Management and Mini MBA in Management  – giving learners a chance to raise any questions, share their thinking on the previous weeks’ modules and glean extra insights from the course professor.