Customers do not browse the entire market before choosing you. They pull a short list from memory, and the brand that is tightly associated with the right occasion and need will appear on that list. Category Entry Points explain why entry points into the category, rather than positioning messages, determine when customers remember you.
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Customers do not browse the whole market before buying. They pull a short list from memory, usually just two or three names, and choose from it. The real question is not “Is my brand better than my competitors?” but “Is my brand on that list, at the moment the customer needs it?”
Memory operates by context, not by ranking.
Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute team call this mechanism Category Entry Points, or CEPs. Each CEP is a specific situation, occasion, emotion or need that pulls a customer into a buying decision in your category. In the coffee sector, for example, there are three situations: “need to be alert on a morning before a meeting”, “want to invite a partner somewhere decent to sit”, “need to work alone for a few hours”. These are three entirely different CEPs, even though they belong to one category.
A brand linked to many CEPs, with links strong enough, will be named more often. This is a theory of how human memory works: memories are pulled up by context, not by a list of features.
Why are many brands absent at the most critical moments?
Brands are often built from the seller's point of view: “Who we are, what we are good at, how we differ from competitors.” This is positioning in the style of Ries and Trout: claiming a “spot” in the customer's mind with a single attribute. There is nothing wrong with this approach. But it skips a more important question: is that attribute actually recalled at the moment the customer faces a buying decision?
The practical result is that many brands have a beautiful identity and a clear message, yet do not come to the customer's mind at the moment it matters. They are remembered during idle time, or when an ad appears, but not when the customer is looking for a solution to a specific problem. This is the gap between “being known” and “being chosen”.
Mental availability is the ability to be thought of in purchasing situations. It does not come from being different, but from appearing often enough, in enough variety, and at the right moments.
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010
CEPs are about choosing your battleground
Identifying CEPs does not mean listing all the times customers might make a purchase and writing ads for each situation. That would dilute resources. What needs to be done is to identify which CEPs are the most common in the industry, which CEPs the brand is anchored to, and which CEPs are still open or occupied by competitors.
For a small business with limited resources, the most effective approach is to choose one or two CEPs with the highest chance of winning. Then focus all your messaging, imagery and experience on them. This works far better than talking about yourself in the style of “we are the best choice for everyone”.
Anchor your brand to CEP: three conditions to meet
The link between a brand and a CEP does not form after a campaign. It is built through consistent repetition over time. Three conditions for this anchoring to work:
- The message must pull toward the customer's situation, not your characteristics. “For a morning that needs to start right” is more specific than “premium quality”.
- Visual and verbal signals must be consistent enough for customers to recognize even without seeing the brand name. This is the role of distinctive assets according to Jenni Romaniuk's research.
- Appear in the right place, at the right time when customers are in or near a purchasing situation. Location, channel, and timing of posts are all part of the CEP, inseparable from the message.
A simple test you can do right away
Ask ten customers who have bought from you one question: “The last time you thought of us, what was the situation?” The answers usually reveal three things. One, the CEPs you are actually winning, which are sometimes different from what you think you are communicating. Two, the situations in which customers remember you but you have never actively spoken about. Three, the CEPs that matter in your category where your name is not mentioned.
From those three findings, you have enough data to decide. Reinforce the CEPs you are winning, set aside the ones with no chance, and consider whether it is worth investing to open a new CEP. This is brand strategy seen from the customer's side, not from an internal spreadsheet.
References
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Oxford University Press, 2010). Jenni Romaniuk & Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow Part 2 (2016). Jenni Romaniuk, Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018). Kantar BrandZ Global Report, ~2020.