1.1
Category Entry Points
The set of situations, needs and moments in which a buyer thinks of a category — the cues a brand must be linked to in memory to be considered at all.
Romaniuk & Sharp, How Brands Grow 2 (2015); codified in Better Brand Health (2023)
What it does
Maps the situations, moments and needs that make people think of the category at all. Brands get chosen because they come to mind in the buying moment, not because they are better; CEPs are the list of those moments, which moves targeting from demographics to occasions.
When it breaks
Useless when the category does not yet exist — a genuinely new product has no moment to be recalled in, and must build one before this tool has anything to work on.
Case
Snickers' “You're not you when you're hungry” rebuilt the brand around the hunger occasion rather than a demographic. In its first full year global sales grew 15.9% with share gains in 56 of 58 markets, adding roughly $376m over 2010–2012.
Campaign — Snickers case study ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
A buyer's day as a timeline with several entry moments marked; one brand's memory links attached to three of them, a rival's to one.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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