Category Entry Point Research

Sweating internal stakeholder knowledge and complementing this with a small handful of consumer surveys/interviews is a useful starting point but it’s underpowered and ineffective in robustly mapping the spectrum of entry points for your category. The ultimate objective of this research is to break free of internal echo chambers, to see what else exists and may have emerged more recently. Successfully mapping the entire spectrum of CEPs (before streamlining and prioritising) relies on data that exhaustively spans all of these potential moments, requiring a large number of responses to cover off (c. 1,000 people). The quantitative approach also provides more data to inform CEP sizing/importance, allowing for more robust prioritisation. In addition, it allows for the rich profiling of each CEP, based on whatever metrics matter to your organisation, as well as feeding into areas like media targeting.

Our approach utilises a custom Appeal Index Score which takes into account not only the size of the CEPs, but several other variables which can include things like brand favourability, potential margin, distribution and growth headroom, amongst other factors. While the size of the CEP is of course a key variable to lead with, it’s important to look at other factors which help determine which should be prioritised in the short/medium term. While you should aim to improve how salient you are for all CEPs, some prioritisation is always needed. Whether you’re a small brand with limited budget & resources, or a big brand which needs focus within their broad reach comms messaging hierarchy, strategy = prioritisation.

They can, however, in the main, there are many more similarities than differences across markets. Where there are variances, it can be caused by any one or several PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal or Environmental) factors, which vary by category and market. Sometimes the underlying CEP is the same but with a slight nuance by market (e.g. Saturday/Sunday afternoon sport watching is universal across many markets; however, the sport will vary). Our approach allows for modelling across multiple markets or a single market, depending on the perceived differences. We are also pragmatic in our approach when working with global brands, there are diminishing returns to including incremental markets beyond a certain point so we will offer recommendations to ensure a good breadth while maintaining research efficiencies. In summary, you won’t need to run across every market, but it may be beneficial to run it in a handful to get a good picture across geographies if managing a global/regional brand.

Measuring CEPs involves quantifying the moments, situations, cues, and contexts in which your brand comes to mind, and then understanding how strongly your brand is linked to each of those moments. Identifying CEPS is firstly important in order to feed into our (or any) CEP measurement solution, while the profiling of our CEPs allows for a concise articulation of CEPs which can be played back to respondents to accurately provide the context for the purchasing/consumption within the research environment.

We use CEPs by first mapping out the full range of situations, needs and contexts that lead people into the category, then prioritising the ones that are both frequent and strategically valuable. Those priority CEPs become the organising frame for our brand plan, shaping what we communicate, where we show up, how we innovate and how we allocate spend, so that everything is aligned to the real moments in which consumers make decisions. This shifts our strategy from broad, generic awareness building to a far more precise approach focused on growing Mental Availability in the contexts that matter most, ultimately making our brand easier to think of, easier to find and easier to buy in the moments that drive growth.