What Are Category Entry Points, and How Do They Improve Brand Tracking?

By quantilope

• article

• Brand Tracking
• Brand Research
• Behavioural Tracking

I’ve been studying human behaviour for fifteen years, and one of the questions I get asked most often by brand teams is some version of this: “We track awareness, consideration, and preference. Isn’t that enough?”.

My honest answer is: it depends on what you’re trying to understand. If you want to know that your brand is growing, traditional funnel metrics can tell you something. But if you want to understand why it’s growing, and more importantly, what you can actually do to make it grow faster, you need to be thinking about category entry points.

Watch a demo of quantilope’s fully automated Better Brand Health Tracking solution, built on the innovative metrics from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute mentioned in this article:

The Problem With Funnel Metrics

Here’s something I find genuinely remarkable: in my experience working with brand trackers across a wide range of categories, I’ve never seen robust evidence that funnel metrics (awareness, consideration, purchase intent) correlate reliably with actual sales market share. We’ve run a meta-analysis across over 100 brands tracked on our platform, and we found an average correlation of 0.83 between mental market share and actual sales. That’s a remarkably strong relationship. The traditional funnel metrics don’t come close to matching it.

That matters because if your north star metric doesn’t connect to real-world outcomes, you’re essentially navigating without a compass. You can improve your brand consideration scores and still lose market share – it happens all the time.

So What is Mental Availability?

The theoretical foundation here comes from Professor Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, whose research (How Brands Grow and Better Brand Health) has fundamentally changed how a lot of us think about brand measurement.

The core idea is that brand growth is driven by two things: physical availability (how easy you are to find and buy) and mental availability (how easily your brand comes to mind in a buying situation). Mental availability isn’t just awareness in the traditional sense; it’s about whether your brand is accessible in memory at the specific moments that trigger a purchase. And those moments are category entry points.

What Exactly is a Category Entry Point?

A Category Entry Point, or CEP, is the need, occasion, or situation that leads a consumer to think about a product category, and the brands within it. The keyword there is situation. Category Entry Points are not brand attributes – they’re not what you think is great about your product. They’re the external cues that activate the category in a buyer’s mind.

Think about body wash, which is a category I work with a lot. “I want to feel fresh” is a CEP. And so is “I want to smell nice” and “I want to take care of myself”. These are the whys behind the purchase: the specific moments, moods, or occasions that bring someone into the category mentally, before they even get near a shelf.

What makes this powerful is the insight that brands don’t define CEPs, buyers do. They exist independently of your brand and your marketing. The job of a brand marketer is to discover which Category Entry Points are the most common and relevant in their category, and then work to build a strong association between their brand and as many of those as possible. The more CEPs your brand is linked to in consumers’ minds, the greater its mental availability, and the more likely it is to be thought of and bought when those moments arise.

Why Breadth Matters More Than Depth

One of the most important things the Ehrenberg-Bass research has demonstrated is that the goal isn’t to own one CEP deeply. It’s to be linked to as many relevant CEPs as broadly as possible.

The reasoning is intuitive once you hear it. Consider that different consumers will enter your category through different doors. Some people buy body wash because they want to feel fresh after a workout. Others are shopping because they want something that smells nice as a small daily treat. Others are motivated by skin care benefits. And others are buying for someone else. If your brand only shows up strongly for one of those entry points, you’re effectively invisible to all the buyers arriving through the other doors.

This is why we measure two distinct components when tracking mental availability. The first is mental penetration, or reach: how many consumers can link your brand to at least one category entry point. The second is network size: how many CEPs on average your brand is associated with. Both matter, but reach tends to be the more powerful driver of brand growth, because it’s about getting your brand into the consideration of people who don’t currently buy you. That’s where the growth comes from.

The Double Jeopardy Problem and How to Solve it

Here’s a frustration I hear constantly from teams working with smaller brands: “The big brands win on everything in our tracker. How are we supposed to know what to do?”.

This is actually a well-documented phenomenon called the double jeopardy law, and it’s been empirically verified across dozens of categories by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Larger brands are thought of more frequently and have more buyers. Smaller brands are thought of less, and their buyers are less loyal. If you just look at raw CEP frequencies, the market leader will appear to dominate on nearly every entry point, which makes it almost impossible to identify strategic opportunities.

The solution is what we call mental advantage: a technique that controls for brand size. Rather than just asking whether Brand X is associated with a given Category Entry Points, we calculate an expected score based on the brand’s overall size, then compare that to the actual score. This tells you whether a brand is genuinely strong or weak on a particular CEP, relative to what we’d expect given its scale.

What this reveals is often surprising. Even very large brands and market leaders frequently have CEP weaknesses when you control for their size. In the body wash category, for example, we can find that even a dominant brand like Dove has entry points where it underperforms relative to expectations. Those are real opportunities for smaller brands to build a genuine mental advantage, not just a volume gap they can never close.

The Three C’s: a Framework for Prioritisation

Identifying your CEP strengths and weaknesses is just the starting point. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute recommends evaluating each CEP through a framework of three questions: How common is the CEP: how frequently does this need or occasion arise? How credible is it for your brand: does it feel like a natural fit? And how competitive is it: are other brands already strongly associated with it?

This framework helps you prioritise where to focus your marketing investment. A CEP that’s common but where no brand has a strong advantage yet is a significant opportunity, what we’d call white space. A CEP where you already have a strong association is worth defending, especially if competitors are beginning to encroach.

One of the most common mistakes I see is brands panicking the moment they see a mental disadvantage in their tracker and wanting to fix it right away. But if the CEP isn’t credible for your brand, then pouring marketing spend into building that association is likely to be wasted. Strategy requires making choices, and the CEP framework only works well when you use it to make clear ones.

From Framework to Action

What excites me most about CEP-based tracking is that it’s genuinely actionable in a way that traditional brand health measurement often isn’t. When you know which category entry points are most common, which ones your brand owns, which are white space, and which competitors are threatening your existing associations, you have a clear brief for your next campaign. You know what message to build, which audience to reach, and what success looks like.

It also connects naturally to other strategic decisions like product innovation, channel strategy, and media planning. A brand trying to build an association with “taking care of myself” will make different choices about where to show up and what to say than one focused on defending “smells nice”.

The shift from measuring brand health as a static set of awareness and consideration scores to tracking the CEP network your brand occupies is a meaningful change in how we think about what brand-building actually is. And in my view, it’s the most productive lens we have for understanding where growth comes from and how to pursue it deliberately.

Watch a demo of quantilope’s fully automated Better Brand Health Tracking solution, built on the innovative metrics from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute mentioned in this article:

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