In short: category entry points (CEPs) are the situations in which a person thinks of a buying category: «Friday night, too tired to cook» for a pizzeria, «the boiler dies in December» for a plumber. The concept comes from Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: CEPs are the building blocks of mental availability, and the more situations bring your brand to mind, the more chances it has of being chosen. You collect them with Romaniuk's seven questions, weigh them by how common they are and how strongly they link to your brand, and own first the common ones where your brand is still weak. Below: the method, a complete example map and the CEPs of twelve categories.
What are category entry points?
A category entry point is the situation that makes someone think of a category before they think of a brand: the need, moment or occasion that triggers «I could use something like...». They are cues tied to real contexts, a time of day, a place, a mood, some company, a goal, far more than technical product attributes.
As the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explains, CEPs are the cues that bring brands back from memory, and linking a brand to more relevant cues grows its mental availability. Mental availability stops being an abstraction and becomes something you build one piece at a time.
A simple test shows the boundary. «Reliable» is an evaluative attribute, and on its own it brings no brand to mind. «When the boiler dies in December» brings a plumber to mind, maybe two. The question to ask: can this phrase, on its own, trigger the memory of a brand? If not, it stays an attribute and does not go on the map.
Why are CEPs the foundation of marketing?
Because they decide who gets remembered the instant a need appears. Generic awareness tells you whether a name sounds familiar. A CEP tells you whether that name shows up when it is needed, which is the only moment memory turns into revenue.
That flips the order of work. Classic positioning tries to own an adjective, the safest, the cheapest, in the mind of a narrow segment; the CEP approach tries to be recalled in as many buying situations as possible across the whole category, which is why it fits growth through penetration and sits badly with buyer personas, built on an ideal customer who carries little weight in the real customer base.
In B2B the maths is even starker. At any given moment only a small share of a category's buyers is ready to buy, about 5% in John Dawes's example, while the rest will enter the market in months or years (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021): owning CEPs means being in memory already when that door opens. The 95-5 rule and CEPs are the same reasoning seen from two sides.
We think it is the most useful idea Ehrenberg-Bass has handed to people working in the field, because it turns a vague goal like «get us better known» into ten precise moments you can work on Monday morning.
How do you find CEPs? Romaniuk's seven questions
CEPs come from buyers' memories, by asking about the real circumstances of recent purchases with seven questions. Romaniuk calls them the 7Ws (when, while, with what, with whom, where, why and how feeling) and described them in her Bigeye interview on Better Brand Health.
| Question | What it looks for | Example answers |
|---|---|---|
| Why | The stated motive | «So I don't arrive empty-handed», «to stop chasing deadlines», «to get it off my mind», «because my wife asked me to» |
| When | Time of day, week, year | «As soon as I wake up», «Friday night», «in September when everything restarts», «two days before the deadline» |
| Where | The physical place | «At the office», «in the car», «on site», «at the corner supermarket» |
| With whom | The company present, which in B2B includes whoever must sign off | «With the kids», «alone», «with the partner who signs», «in front of a client» |
| With what | The products next to yours at that moment | «With pizza», «with the ERP we already use» |
| While doing what | The activity under way when the need appears | «While watching the match», «while writing the tender specs» |
| How feeling | The mood that colours the memory | «In a rush», «tired», «under pressure to deliver», «relieved because I closed the deal» |
Source: Jenni Romaniuk's 7Ws (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute); the example answers are ours.
Seven questions do not produce seven CEPs. They produce a raw list of phrases, and a CEP is born when several dimensions cross into a recognisable scene. «In the evening» on its own helps nobody. «In the evening, with colleagues, after a bad day, with no energy to decide where to go» is an entry point a brand can build years of communication on.
Whom do you interview, and how?
You interview the category's buyers, not just your customers. Home-made maps often do the opposite: they ask loyal customers, the most willing to answer and the least representative of the category, and the resulting map describes the moments where the brand already wins.
Collection works in two stages, as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute describes in its CEP research service. The first surfaces the situations with questions tailored to the category; the second weighs them, measuring how much each CEP matters and how strongly the brand is linked to it compared with competitors.
In the first stage the questions are about the last purchase that actually happened, not a hypothetical one. «The last time you bought [category], what had happened just before? Where were you? With whom? What time was it? How did you feel?». Imagined answers produce what the respondent thinks is the right answer; answers about a real episode produce the memory, which is what you are measuring.
Write the words down exactly as spoken. If the customer says «when the screed cracks», that phrase goes on the map as is, not translated into «cementitious substrate repair requirements». The map exists to recognise the moment from the point of view of whoever lives it, and internal jargon makes it unrecognisable.
Keep going until new interviews stop bringing new situations. Then group the phrases by situation, remove duplicates and you have a list of candidates, which in B2B tends to run longer because technical moments are more numerous.
How do you quantify CEPs?
With a second, closed survey: a sample of category buyers sees the collected CEPs and says which brands come to mind for each. That produces the measures Romaniuk codified in Better Brand Health (Oxford University Press, 2023).
| Measure | What it counts | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| CEP prevalence | How many category buyers live that situation, and how often | How much is this entry point worth? |
| Mental penetration | Share of category buyers who link the brand to at least one CEP | How many people have me in memory at all? |
| Network size | Average number of CEPs linked to the brand, among those who link it to at least one | How many doors do I reach, when I reach someone? |
| Mental market share | The brand's links as a share of all brand links in the category | How much category memory do I hold against competitors? |
Source: Jenni Romaniuk, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World, Oxford University Press, 2023, and her Bigeye interview.
Read the two core measures together. A brand with high mental penetration and a narrow network is known by many for one thing only, and grows by adding moments. A brand with a wide network and low penetration covers the moments well but reaches few heads, and grows by buying reach. The diagnosis changes the media plan before it changes the copy.
For small and mid-sized companies a survey like this rarely fits the first year's budget, so the map stays qualitative. That is fine on one condition: the ranking of CEPs is declared as a hypothesis to test, not as data. The next step is to put the same questions into your brand tracking, where they cost little because you are already paying for the sample.
Which CEPs should you own first?
The common CEPs where your brand is still weak, because that is where the room for growth sits. Owning a moment you already dominate adds little; owning one few people live reaches few. Crossing prevalence with strength of association gives four quadrants, and only one deserves new budget for the next twelve months.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Common, brand weak | The priority. The next twelve months of creative go here |
| Common, brand strong | Maintain by repeating distinctive assets, no new investment |
| Rare, brand weak | Leave it until the quadrants above are covered |
| Rare, brand strong | A niche to defend at zero cost, never the core identity |
The number of CEPs you actively work on stays small for a budget reason: every door needs its own creative and its own frequency, and a small company cannot open twenty at once. Better three doors owned for a year than ten touched once.
A worked example: the CEP map of a pizzeria
Take a neighbourhood pizzeria, invented for the example, that sells mostly at the table on Saturday nights. Interviews with people in the area, not just its own customers, surface six recurring situations. The owner has no quantitative survey, so prevalence and strength are estimates declared as hypotheses, to be checked with a question in the next survey.
| CEP | Main Ws | Prevalence (hypothesis) | Brand strength (hypothesis) | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saturday night with friends | When, with whom | High | High | Maintain |
| Friday night, tired, no will to cook | When, how feeling | High | Low | Priority: takeaway and delivery |
| Watching the match at home | While, where | High | Low | Priority: match calendar |
| A child's birthday | Why, with whom | Medium | Low | Year two |
| Quick dinner before the cinema | When, where | Low | High | Defend at zero cost |
| Business dinner with a client | With whom, why | Low | Low | Drop |
Illustrative example: the pizzeria and the estimates are invented to show the method.
The reading is immediate. The place is strong in the moment that already fills it and absent from two common situations that never pass through the table. The twelve-month plan starts there: communication built on the tired Friday night and the match at home, with the same colours and the same name clearly visible, and a question in the next survey to check whether the two prevalence hypotheses hold.
CEP examples in twelve categories
Examples help more than a definition, because the hard jump is from the concept to the phrase. Six consumer and six B2B categories, four CEPs each, written the way a customer would say them.
| Category | Four typical CEPs |
|---|---|
| Coffee capsules | Just up, before leaving · mid-afternoon at the office · when guests arrive after dinner · when I need to stay awake to finish a job |
| Pizzeria | Friday night with no will to cook · a child's birthday · quick dinner before the cinema · when there are eight of us and we need a place that fits us |
| Pastry shop | When I have to bring a dessert to friends' for dinner · Sunday morning · last-minute gift · when there is something to celebrate at the office |
| Supplements | When I start training again in September · when I've slept badly for weeks · when blood tests say something is missing · before leaving for two weeks |
| Car insurance | When the renewal notice arrives · when I buy a used car · when the premium went up with no explanation · when my son gets his licence |
| Plumber | When the boiler dies in December · when a stain appears on the ceiling · before redoing the bathroom · when hot water comes and goes |
| Construction chemicals | When the screed cracks · when I have to waterproof a flush terrace · when the ventilated facade needs a certified system · when the tender asks for a certification I don't have |
| Industrial supplies | When the line is down and the part is needed tomorrow · when the usual supplier stretches lead times · when I design a new machine · when the original spare part goes out of production |
| Business software | When the accountant asks for an export I don't have · when we hire the fifth employee · when two people keep the same data in two different files · when an invoicing rule changes |
| Business law firm | When a client hasn't paid for six months · when a new partner joins · when a letter arrives I don't understand · when we sign our first foreign contract |
| Press office | When a bad review goes viral · when we launch a product · when a competitor is in the papers and we aren't · when we have to present ourselves to an investor |
| Marketing agency | I'm about to rebuild the website · the ads don't pay anymore · I want to show up in AI answers · I have to justify the budget to my partner or CFO |
Illustrative examples: in a real map the phrases come from interviews with category buyers.
Look at the shape of the phrases. None names a product, none contains a quality adjective, all start from a moment. That is what separates a CEP map from a list of benefits rewritten in italics.
Which mistakes make a CEP map useless?
Romaniuk worked with the Consumer Insights taskforce of VIA, the Dutch communication association, on a series about the most common mistakes, picked up by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The first is confusing CEPs with brand values: «reliable» or «innovative» describe how you want to be seen, not the situation in which someone looks for you.
The second is treating the CEP list as a complete inventory to cover item by item. Mappers tend to collect every nuance and end up with a list where priorities disappear, while the map exists precisely to choose.
The third is trying to own a CEP exclusively. As the Institute writes, consumers rarely associate just one brand with a specific CEP, so a total-occupation strategy wastes budget on a goal memory does not grant. The realistic goal is to get into the set of brands recalled, and stay there.
We add a fourth: confusing a CEP with a keyword. A page's title and H1 stay on the commercial intent people actually search on Google; the CEP opens the body copy, with the words of the moment the problem shows up. Put the CEP in the title and you lose the searches; keep it out of the copy and you lose the memory.
How do you bring the map into communication?
One CEP at a time, with the same assets. The working rule is that each campaign, each service page and each editorial strand owns a different CEP, while the distinctive assets that hook the situation to the right name stay fixed. Colour, logo and sonic signature are the thread back to the brand; the CEP is the door the thread passes through.
Showing the brand inside the moment of use builds the association better than a list of features. A construction chemicals maker that publishes ten short videos, each tied to a precise moment on site, is building ten doors; the same maker publishing ten videos about its certificates is building zero doors and ten brochures.
Progress is measured over time, asking the same questions months apart and checking whether the network widens. Mental availability without physical availability stays an exercise, because a brand that is remembered but cannot be found still loses the sale. The full framework behind all this is in our How Brands Grow summary.
FAQ
What is the difference between a category entry point and a customer need?
A CEP is broader: it includes the need and also the context that triggers it, meaning moment, place, company, activity and mood. It describes the concrete situation in which someone thinks of the category, and that context is what makes it useful for building recall.
How many CEPs should a brand own?
On the map, as many as the interviews surface; in active communication, few, the common ones where the brand is weak. Mental availability grows with the number of CEPs linked to the brand, but a small company's attention budget does not.
Do you need expensive research to map CEPs?
For a first map, interviews with category buyers are enough, until new situations stop emerging. The quantitative survey ranks CEPs by prevalence and strength of association, and it is cheaper to attach it to an existing brand tracker than to buy it on its own.
Do CEPs apply in B2B too?
Yes, and in B2B they weigh more because the buying cycle is long. CEPs are the situations that trigger the search for a supplier, such as a contract nearing renewal, a plant stoppage, a rule that changes or a tender spec to meet. Linking the brand to them builds memory among the large majority of buyers who are not buying today (Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass, 2021).
Can a CEP be an SEO keyword?
Rarely. People search Google with commercial intent («car insurance online»), while the CEP is the moment before that search («when the renewal notice arrives»). The CEP drives the body copy and the angle of the content; the keyword drives title and H1.
Sources and references
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Category Entry Points Dissected: How They Really Contribute to Growth.
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Category Entry Points: The Last Two Strategic Pitfalls Unraveled.
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Identifying and Prioritising Category Entry Points.
- Bigeye. Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk (Part 2), interview.
- Romaniuk, J. (2023). Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190340902.
- Increasing mental market share by using category entry points (2023). jenniromaniuk.com.
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (2021). The 95:5 rule is the new 60:40 rule, on John Dawes's work.
PS: the cover of this article is AI-generated.
