When it comes to the world of product development, if you’re not taking into consideration CEPs you could be missing out on powerful brand tool that could be the difference between your brand’s success or failure.
Category entry points, or CEPs for short, are the occasions, moments or buying situations that trigger a consumer to evoke products or brands to solve or meet their need. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which developed the concept, CEPs are “the building blocks of Mental Availability”.
“[They] capture the thoughts that category buyers have as they transition into making a category purchase.”
—Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
For example, during tax time, a small business owner might realise that they need accountancy services and may evoke one of the many accountancy software platforms to help them. That situation where the consumer went from not being in market for the service/software to actively considering. Tax time acts as the category entry point or trigger. And many of them exist across each category.
Why use CEPs?
CEPs provide valuable insights to various aspects of your business, brand, and product marketing. They are a business multi-tool that can be used at different levels in your organisation. We’ve highlighted a few key uses below.
New product development
In the case of new product development, CEPs are a tool that goes beyond measuring when or whether consumers are likely to buy your product (or not). They can be used to identify whether a new product idea taps into whitespace opportunities or competes with existing products, helping ensure you develop ideas that are differentiated from offers currently in the market. Identifying CEPs requires you to really explore your product's role. When is it used? How is it used? When is it bought? Who is it bought for? And so on. All of this provides powerful information for both your existing and new products.
Marketing
In a marketing context, CEPs can be used to target a product to particular usage occasions or needs. For example, advertising might bring to life a CEP moment that resonates for the audience or one they wish to resonate with, i.e. McDonald's recent It's Good To Be The Driver campaign.
This advertising reinforced this CEP for audiences who have already built a connection between McDonald's and road trips. At the same time, it also brings the occasion to light for other audiences who may not have connected the two ideas together yet. How many Kiwi families stopped for McDonald's this summer while on a road trip who previously hadn't?
CEPs can also bridge the gap into channel strategy as brands consider where consumers are more likely to shop for the need, i.e. is it something they'd buy at a grocery store or more on-the-go at a petrol station?
Brand strategy and health
Category entry points have their origin in brand health and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's work on brand saliency. By laddering up your brand and its competitors' performance against CEPs, you can gain an overall measure of your brand mental availability versus your competitors'.
Not only do CEPs provide a measure of the spaces your brand “owns” in the market, but also the spaces your competitors own too (or don’t). For this reason, CEPs are often included in brand health tracking programmes as a measure of core brand associations.
How to leverage your category entry points
1. Identify
“When are we thought of? Where do we currently play? What are our strengths?”
This comes from looking at your product from the consumer’s point of view to understand how they would use it and when they would buy it. Explore with consumers to uncover the occasions the product is being/will be used for, as well as the needs it meets and the benefits it provides. Research at this stage can be anything from using knowledge from within your business to engaging and observing consumers in their homes or more extensive workshopping and focus groups.
2. Measure
"How are we currently perceived? Who are we competing with in these moments?"
Once you have identified your current CEPs and where you want to grow, it is important to get a baseline measure on your performance and your competitors, or the other brands evoked by the consumer in these moments. Measured over time this will enable you to track performance of the brand against key associations, providing another perspective on brand health. Without this, it is difficult to assess your growth and the success of any CEP shifting efforts.
3. Build and grow
“Where do we want to be? What whitespace do we want to play in?”
Now that you have identified which CEPs your product is currently associated with, you can look beyond these into the whitespaces. When is your brand not used or considered, when are other products substituted and why? What attributes do they have? What needs do they meet? Could the strengths of your brand or product’s attributes be reframed to tap into these new opportunities?
"Early in my career, I worked with a client whose NPD programme was stuck in a loop. Product-centric development meant their ‘new’ ideas were simply meeting the same needs and occasions as their previous and well-established ranges. While they would sometimes achieve strong purchase intent, they were almost exclusively cannibalising existing products and not growing the pie meaning many launches were unsustainable. Whilst not using the term, they had effectively identified CEPs through a wide-reaching usage and attitudes study, but these usage occasions were not measured as part of their NPD assessment so the overlap with current products was not apparent to them (a result of the organisation’s siloed thinking)." —Mark Vincett, Sapien Founder
Category entry points pave the way for strategic brand growth
Understanding your CEPs leads to greater and more in-depth knowledge of how your brand is positioned both in the mind of your customers, within your category, and amongst your competitors. With this knowledge, you will be better able to strategise, develop and grow your brand —whether through targeting marketing messages or product innovation to better meet consumer needs. So, if you're on the hunt for a way to effectively grow your brand, CEPs are an invaluable tool to explore.
See distinctiveness in action in our Sealord case study.
