How to Activate Category Entry Points (CEPs)

Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the cues and triggers that make a consumer think of a specific category – like shampoo, coffee, or apparel. They represent the exact moments a need or desire arises – such as “after a workout” (for shampoo), “in the morning” (for coffee), and “when going on a trip” (for apparel). CEPs are foundational to Better Brand Health Tracking: an approach developed by Professor Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) for Marketing Science.

Understanding and activating CEPs is what makes a brand become more "mentally available"; Mental Availability is how readily your brand comes to mind when consumers find themselves in particular buying situations (aka, in CEPs). You want your brand to be mentally available, because there’s far more likelihood that a consumer will choose whatever brand naturally comes to mind instead of extending the effort to browse all possible options. Brands that master CEPs and Mental Availability are the ones that are able to drive long-term brand growth and increased market share.

Ready to connect your brand to those pivotal purchase moments for smarter business decision-making when it comes to brand strategy? Below we dive into how to uncover and activate CEPs.

Key Takeaways:

Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the cues or triggers that prompt a consumer to shop in a particular product or service category.
CEPs are foundational to Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT) and effective brand growth; they let you know what's bringing consumers to your category so you can effectively tailor marketing and product development strategies around specific consumer wants and needs.
Activating CEPs means leveraging your CEP insights in actual brand decisions (i.e. marketing campaigns, new product lines, research and development sprints, etc.).
Key CEP metrics include Mental Availability (how present your brand is in consumers' minds) and Mental Advantages (how better/worse your brand performs relative to expectations).
quantilope's CEP Generator allows brands to generate an initial list of 35 CEPs to use in their brand growth efforts – such as a BBHT study on the platform.

The 5-step workflow to activating your Category Entry Points

Below are five common steps in uncovering, analyzing, and activating CEPs for your specific product or service category.

1. Uncover and pinpoint relevant CEPs

The first step to activating CEPs for your market is to focus on your category’s consumer (i.e. how they think, feel, and act in your category). You can't rely on assumptions; you need to uncover the actual triggers that prompt a consumer to think about going out and shopping in your category.

The most powerful CEPs are often subtle – like a shift in mood, a new life stage, or a specific time of day. So, instead of thinking about the typical reasons why people buy coffee (like tiredness or morning routines), think about other use cases that bring people to the coffee category (perhaps “to host house guests”, "while on a roadtrip”, or “when I’m cold”). It’s these moments that help brands fine-tune their branding and positioning to stand out as a leader in their category.

So, how do you come up with your list of CEPs? Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) recommends using the “7Ws”, which encourages brands to think about:

Why consumers shop in their category (consumer motivations or needs)

When consumers shop in their category (time, occasion, or event)

Where consumers shop in their category (location or context)

While consumers shop in their category (co-activities or simultaneous tasks)

With/For Whom consumers shop in their category (social or personal context)

With/For What consumers shop in their category (associated products or services)

ho(W) consumers feel shopping in your category (emotional states or sentiments)

Using the 7Ws as a basis for brainstorming, you’d come up with a long list of potential CEPs and later narrow them down for your final study. At quantilope, we make the process even simpler with our CEP Generator – an AI-driven tool that generates a list of 35 initial CEPs to further refine and expand upon for use in a tracking study. quantilope narrows down the final CEP list using a Single Implicit Association Test (SIAT) to only leverage the most highly-associated CEPs within the tracker (typically around 20).

2. Prioritize high-impact opportunities

Once you have your list of CEPs, you’ve added them to your tracking study, and you have your final study results, you have to begin prioritizing by greatest impact. If you make the mistake of focusing on too many CEPs at once, you’ll dilute your efforts and confuse consumers.

High-impact, strategic CEPs are typically defined based on the 3 “Cs”: Commonality, Credibility, and Competition.

Commonality: How often does the CEP occur within the category for a wide range of buyers? High frequency = high opportunity; prioritize CEPs that occur often, maximizing the chances your brand comes to mind. For example, “to feel clean” would be a very common CEP for any brand in the body wash or shampoo category, whereas “to smell like vanilla” is a bit niche.
Credibility: How believable is it that your brand can solve for a particular CEP? Strong fit = strong memory link/credibility. Focus on CEPs that align with your existing products, services, or offerings. If the top CEP doesn’t quite fit with your brand or reputation, it will fall short in the long run. A CEP should naturally connect to your product’s core benefits.
Competition: Which competitor (if any) currently have Mental Advantages for the CEP you're interested in going after. Lower competition = easier ownership. Jump on opportunities where you have commonality and credibility, and where there are no other brands that clearly “own” the space already; these are strategic whitespaces in the competitive landscape.

Whichever CEPs you choose to focus on, remember to be strategic and thoughtful. Concentrate on a few high-value CEPs to start (3-5 for a 6-12 month time period) and work on “owning” those in your category before moving onto new ventures or expanding into new areas.

3. Build consistent brand associations

After deciding which CEPs to prioritize, you’ll then have to decide how to actually connect those CEPs to your brand and how to most effectively plant your brand in the mind of consumers, in connection with these key moments. You can do this in a number of ways:

Marketing/Advertising: Your messaging and creative assets should clearly feature and link your brand to the CEP you’re looking to go after. Perhaps you’re a brand in the alcoholic beverage space, and a top CEP from your study is “while hosting holiday guests”. This is a great opportunity to craft your marketing strategies and advertising collateral around the holidays, showing friends and family sharing your beverage. You should mention specific CEP terms in these marketing efforts and create scenery/imagery that clearly depicts them.
New product development: Some CEP opportunities might mean launching new variants or products specifically designed to close a functional or emotional gap. Let’s say you operate in the household cleaning sector and you uncover a strategic CEP for the category is “for reducing pet odors”. Currently, you don’t have a cleaning product specifically geared toward pet owners and those specific cleaning needs. This is a great opportunity to create a product that will cater to this audience for a strategic CEP in the space.
Product Packaging: Consider CEPs as you design (or redesign) product packaging. Visual cues such as color, text, or imagery can have a profound impact on purchase. Say a CEP in the makeup category is “for a night out”. Your makeup product’s packaging could incorporate phrasing like “Night” or “Party” and your packaging could include colors that are bright, bold, and fun.
Customer loyalty programs: Structure rewards, messaging, and communication around CEPs to encourage repeat behavior. For example, if a top CEP in the fast casual dining space is “for lunch in the office”, your loyalty program could reward consumers for referring others with the same office email alias. Marketing efforts could visualize coworkers sharing lunch, or incorporating language like "in between meetings".

Remember, repetition is key for retention. Purchase decisions are made through consistent, real-world exposure. Use the same visual cues, phrases, and emotional tone across every branding touchpoint to embed the link deep into consumers' memory structures.

4. Integrate CEPs across media and channels

After deciding on your CEP strategy, don’t forget to integrate those changes across your brand’s media sources and channels to create broad appeal for your brand. The changes you make based on CEP research should carry over to anything your brand produces, in order to engrain that CEP in buyers’ memories.

So, if you introduce new marketing efforts based on a particular CEP, carry those efforts over to all other digital ads, email alerts, and in-store displays. Similarly, if you make a packaging design change, don’t forget to implement changes to assets like online store-fronts and social media posts to strengthen the association.

5. Measure and optimize over time

CEP activation is a continuous cycle of tracking, learning, and adjustment, not a one-off campaign. Real-time tracking of your brand’s category will let you know if the changes you’ve made based on CEP learnings are having the desired effect. If not, how can you further emphasize the CEP to form connections in consumers’ minds. Sustained effort in aligning marketing, product, and sales around the central brand-CEP narrative is key to deeply embedding it into the category.

As you strengthen ownership of the initial CEPs you decide to go after, you can start to expand into new strategic market entry points. As a reminder, you don’t want to go after too many CEPs at once. It’s best to strategically prioritize based on the greatest impact (following the 3Cs mentioned above).
Back to Table of Contents

Key metrics for tracking CEP association strength

To measure your success in activating CEPs and forming mental connections among consumers, focus on these powerful, data-driven KPIs within your Better Brand Health tracker:

Mental Availability

Tracking Mental Availability is a great indicator of how well your efforts have worked in increasing ownership of a particular CEP among your target audience. Mental Availability is broken out into four main metrics:

Mental Market Share: Overall, how 'present' a brand is in consumers' minds, relevant to competition. If this metric is higher than actual sales market share, consumers might face physical availability barriers. Inversely, if your brand has higher physical availability than mental market share, your marketing efforts may not be effectively hitting the mark.
Mental Penetration: The percentage of category buyers who can link the brand to at least one CEP. Mental Penetration is most important to build for non-buyers, because this clearly outlines your brand’s growth potential and essentially gets a foot through the door with these consumers. If you create just one connection with existing non-buyers of your brand, your Mental Penetration will increase.
Network Size: The number of CEPs that a brand is linked to in a consumer's mind. The more CEP associations, the greater chances a brand will come to mind in a variety of buying scenarios.
Share of Mind: An indication of which other brands customers are thinking of in addition to a specific brand. This metric is usually more interesting for bigger brands, especially among brand buyers, as it can indicate which competitors might be “stealing” buyers.

Mental Advantage

Mental Advantage analysis measures a brand's performance for a specific CEP or brand attribute, relative to what would be expected given the brand's size and that CEP/attribute's general relevance to the product category as a whole. It essentially answers the question: "Is our brand performing better than expected, are we right on par with where we would expect to be, or are we lagging behind?"

Brands have a Mental Advantage when their association with a CEP/attribute is significantly higher than expected. Conversely, brands have a Mental Disadvantage when their association with a CEP/attribute is significantly lower than expected. With this analysis, brands of all sizes can track their strength and performance in the category for a particular CEP to determine actionable next steps.

U&A Tracking Metrics

In addition to the above metrics central to Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT), brands can also track and monitor shifts in general usage and attitude (U&A) metrics – whether within their same BBHT study or separately. While not directly tied to CEPs, these metrics point to whether or not brands are gaining or losing traction in the market, around the time they’ve implemented changes based on CEP insights.

Key metrics to track over time include:

Brand awareness: Is general awareness of your brand rising over time? Do you see a spike after releasing a new product or ad campaign related to CEPs?
Purchase Intent Shift: The measurable change in consumer consideration or purchase likelihood for the brand over time.
Ad recall: Shifts in ad recall, before and after implementing CEP-related changes.
Customer satisfaction: How customers feel about your brand over time.
Back to Table of Contents

Common pitfalls that weaken CEP programs

Even the most thorough and detailed CEP strategies can fall short if you fall into these common traps:

Not optimizing assets with CEPs before release: CEPs can get lost if your branding and marketing assets don’t clearly communicate your intended message. Make sure to optimize your final assets before release, which you can do through an advanced methodology like an A/B test.
Spreading efforts too thin: Marketing teams trying to target too many CEPs simultaneously (or featuring too many CEPs within a single piece of creative) is the fastest way to dilute your brand’s impact and make your budget less cost-effective.
Confusing CEPs with USPs: A CEP is the reason a person is looking for the category ("I need a quick breakfast"). A USP is the reason they choose your brand ("This cereal has 50% less sugar"). Your message must address the CEP first; after all, if consumers aren’t shopping in your category, they’re not shopping for your brand.
Skipping ongoing measurement: Ignoring the need for continuous tracking means you can't make informed decisions with crucial context. You need to know which associations are consistently strong over time, and which need immediate attention based on current market trends.
Ignoring competitive context: Understanding and tracking what your competitors are doing is how you identify potential whitespace opportunities. That's why BBHT studies are designed for the category, analyzed for the buyer, and reported on for the brand. This helps ensure your study is comprehensive enough to provide competitive context.
Back to Table of Contents

Accelerating CEP activation with automated research

Advanced research platforms like quantilope offer researchers a hybrid approach to stay hands-on with their in-depth insights, but outsource tedious tasks to automated platform algorithms and AI-driven features. In particular, quantilope’s automated solution to Better Brand Health Tracking makes it fast and simple to uncover, track, and monitor CEP performance over time.

quantilope’s CEP Generator lets brands generate an initial list of CEPs to use in their brainstorming while building out a strategic brand growth strategy. For BBHT studies, that means iterating and refining this list down to about 20 CEPs that the brand will track in their study over time.

Brands using quantilope’s platform for CEP-related work will have access to:

Automated charting and reporting: Use quantilope's pre-built, customizable dashboard templates or start completely from scratch, with reports automatically updating in real-time with any newly-available data (as respondents complete your survey). Charts automatically update wave-over-wave as well, so you can continuously monitor CEP association strength to pivot or adjust brand positioning before it’s too late.

Intuitive data visualizations: Quickly see where your brand performs significantly better or worse with automated significance testing on trend charts and a color-coded Mental Advantage analysis table.
quantilope’s Integrated AI co-pilot - quinn : Lean on quinn to help generate survey inputs, charts, and final dashboard summaries with actionable next steps based on key CEP opportunities.

With quantilope’s automated approach to Better Brand Health Tracking and CEPs, you can quickly go from intuition to validated insights, with clear steps to become a leader in your category.

Ready to stop guessing and start activating your brand’s growth potential? Get in touch below!