In One Slide, We Show Why Analysing Category Entry Points Should be a Fundamental Part of a Brand’s Market Orientation.
I recently wrote an article where I outlined five key steps to building an effective mental availability strategy.
https://smilingcfo.co.uk/strong-brands-have-healthy-mental-availability/
One of the areas that sparked the most questions was category entry points, so I’d like to dive a bit deeper into that topic. Feel free to watch the video version or if you prefer just keep reading…
If you’re responsible for brand strategy, one of the most valuable analyses you can conduct as part of your market orientation is understanding the retrieval cues buyers use in different purchasing situations. In other words, what are the category entry points (CEPs) that consumers rely on to access the category and recall specific brands from memory?
The next step is determining which of these CEPs are used most frequently by the majority of consumers, as not all category entry points hold equal importance. After that, you’ll want to assess how strongly your brand is associated with each of these entry points, and how that compares to your competitors.
This is where it gets interesting for those seeking growth opportunities. You can begin to identify white spaces, that is, those CEPs where no brand has a Mental Advantage and they could credibly be associated with your brand.
In the video, I show you how to get all of these answers by plotting the output of a Mental Availability Assessment onto one slide.
This example uses real data from the chocolate category. I’ve simplified the chart by removing the brand names, but the red squares represent a real brand in our research, and as the slide builds, the category entry points will become clearer. The CEPs are drawn directly from our study.
Here, we’ve plotted the brand, showing its level of association with each category entry point, compared to what we’d expect for a brand of its size. This is represented by the deviation score on the left-hand axis.
Some Category Entry Points are more important than others.
For instance, we can see that our brand has a stronger-than-expected association with CEP 2.
But, is CEP 2 an important category entry point?
To answer that, we layer on a bar chart that shows the number of times each CEP is mentioned or linked to a brand, helping us identify the most significant ones.
The good news for our brand is that CEP 2 is indeed important, as it’s among the most frequently mentioned. The more crucial CEPs appear on the left, while the less important ones are on the right.
Brands with a Mental Advantage across multiple Category Entry Points are likely to have stronger Mental Availability.
Next, we assess where our brand holds a mental advantage.
Jenni Romaniuk, (Better Brand Health), defines a mental advantage as a deviation score greater than five percentage points for any particular CEP. She also highlights the law of diminishing returns, which suggests that going beyond a certain point, say a 15-20 point deviation, won’t provide additional benefits. Therefore we’ve defined an optimal zone between five and ten percentage points, and our brand falls within this zone, which is a positive sign.
However, to truly drive growth, brands need to have multiple mental advantages.
Let’s start with the fact that our brand is strongly associated with “suitable as a gift,” which is an important CEP. But how are our competitors performing?
I’ve now plotted a blue circle representing another brand in the category. It also has a mental advantage in “suitable as a gift”. Additionally, it has mental advantages in “indulgence” and “giving chocolate as a romantic gesture”.
This competitor, in terms of mental availability, appears stronger than our brand.
So, how can our brand grow?
More often than not you will find White Spaces that present growth opportunities for your brand.
I’ve now plotted grey dots to represent other brands in the category. By scanning the mental advantage zone we could spot four potential white spaces.
Let’s take a closer look at one.
CEP 4 is “relaxing at home,” such as enjoying chocolate while watching TV. Can our brand credibly associate with this CEP?
Now, let’s look at another—CEP 8, which is focused on “sharing.” Again, we ask ourselves, can our brand realistically align with this entry point?
This is the process you’ll go through as you evaluate each category entry point.
That’s how you can use category entry points as the foundation for your mental availability strategy.
In the next video, we’ll go deeper into brand positioning and explore how to position your brand across multiple category entry points.
For those wanting a more detailed exploration of CEPs, Jenni Romaniuk’s book *Better Brand Health* is an excellent resource.
https://marketingscience.info/better-brand-health
If you are interested in completing a Mental Availability Assessment for your brand drop me a note; Martin@smilingcfo.co.uk
Or if you would like to have a go at running one yourself here is an explainer on how to approach it:
