For the last twenty years, brand love has been a popular strategy in the marketing sphere. However, when it comes to giving brands an effective understanding of how to drive consideration and purchase, it often comes up short.
Boiled down, the ultimate goal of a brand is to drive acquisition. From a practical standpoint, a brand’s performance is defined by shareholder value. Businesses make money selling things; they work to attract more customers to buy its products or services, who then, ideally, go on to tell others about their great experience doing so.
For this reason, it’s imperative that brands understand more than how their customers’ feel about their brand, but the occasions when they would or would not consider purchasing it.
To be clear, brand emotions have their place and can act as powerful heuristics in shaping purchase decisions, but they are not the whole picture. A loved brand might not be evoked in certain circumstances as it isn’t perceived to meet a need. When it comes to driving consumers through the funnel of awareness, consideration and purchase, businesses often need a more concrete understanding of why. What associations or attributes ensure a brand is considered? What ultimately drives purchase?
Which is where category entry points (CEPs) can help.
Category entry points, commonly referred to as CEPs, are the occasions or situations that trigger a brand to be recalled. First conceptualised in Byron Sharp’s seminal work How Brands Grow, they have become a firmly established measure of brand saliency.
Read more: Understanding category entry points and when to use them
CEPs offer a clearer way for businesses to understand what really matters to people when they are choosing a brand. For example, while it may get your brand evoked, customers aren’t necessarily looking for love when they choose a soft drink or buy a car, they’re more likely to be thinking about their specific needs or the benefits they associate with the brand. So, while it’s interesting to measure a concept like brand love, it is often disconnected from the triggers to purchase.
This is what CEPs help brands to understand.
“It’s not to discount the deeper feelings people have around brands, which often trigger mental shortcuts,” says Mark Vincett, Research Director at Perceptive. “These decision-making heuristics help to ensure your brand is evoked, and in some circumstances make it the preferred choice amongst a set of competitors at the consideration stage. However, CEPs bring a more practical and richer understanding of a brand. They provide more detail on how and when it is thought of and what attributes influence purchase. It helps to unpack the ‘why’ of purchase. ‘I am choosing the brand because…’ creating opportunities for targeted brand messaging and activation, building on the emotional connection with real world reasons to buy.”
It is these detailed insights that provide brands with valuable information about how to build stronger paths to purchase, leveraging their strengths and addressing perceived weakness.
While measuring emotions like brand love quantifies the strength of feeling consumers have towards a brand, that ‘love’ often lacks a direct connection to actual consideration and purchase. CEPs, on the other hand, do. And by building a thorough understanding of CEPs that lead towards purchase, a brand can move beyond simply being considered to appearing to have met—in some cases pre-empted—the consumers’ needs.
“CEPs provide a more practical lever to pull,” says Mark.
CEPs go a step further, providing deeper insights that also help brands understand how they can influence choice and decision-making beyond awareness and into the consideration stage.
For example, in crowded categories, the consumer might evoke many brands. This time, think fast food. A consumer expressing a high level of brand love for your fast food brand might get your brand on their mental list, but your offer might not meet the consumer's needs in that moment (e.g., ‘The closest outlet is too far away’, or ‘I don’t feel like a burger’). Understanding your brand’s CEPs could help you decide to double down on what you're great at, or guide range development, extending your products/menu items to include a wider range of occasions/needs and ultimately category entry points.
Read more: How Humans Decide: What drives consumer choice, and how brands should respond
By understanding how their brand is perceived in relation to a specific situation, brands are better able to tailor their messaging, creative, and positioning to increase the likelihood of becoming a preferred brand in the competitor set and ultimately the one chosen for purchase.
While incredibly useful, it is worth noting CEPs are just one aspect of a brand. The reality is, brands have numerous components that feed into them, from emotions, funnels and CEPs through to customer and employee experience. For this reason, we always recommend taking a holistic approach, building a suite of relevant metrics that allows you to better understand and assess your performance across the many elements that influence your customer’s buying decision.
For more information about how to build your brand across its lifetime—and the different insights you can leverage at each stage of your brand’s growth—check out our Building Your Brand guide.