Category Entry Point (CEPs)
Research & Measurement

A Category Entry Point is a real-world buying trigger. This can refer to a moment, situation, place or need that sparks someone to think about a product category.

Examples:

• “It’s game day” → beer
• “I’m stressed” → chocolate
• “I have a long drive ahead” → coffee

CEP measurement pinpoints which of these buying triggers your brand owns, and which ones your competitors own instead. The more mental hooks your brand has, the more often it will thought of and bought in purchase situations.

Because brand image alone doesn’t drive growth; being remembered at the right time does.

Most people don’t shop with your brand top-of-mind all day. They make buying decisions in seconds, based on the first brand they recall when a need arises. CEP measurement focuses on when your brand gets remembered, which is a far stronger predictor of sales than perception and brand imago surveys alone.

The empirical relationship between CEP network size and brand growth is outlined in Byron Sharp's work (How Brands Grow) and Jenni Romaniuk's Better Brand Health.

It’s simple: more CEPs equals more sales opportunities.

We measure three metrics:

• Mental Market Share
• Network Size
• Mental Penetration

that have a proven link to future sales growth. If you grow these numbers, you grow your market share. And because you learn exactly which CEP's your brand does and doesn't own, you have a clear direction for future brand growth.

Most brands start with a one-time pilot to identify the most valuable buying triggers in their category using our 5W framework.

From there, we recommend annual tracking to measure progress, outpace competitors, and keep your brand’s mental availability sharp.

Absolutely. We tailor every study to your category, audience, and market goals. That includes the specific CEPs we measure, competitive benchmarking, and, if you need it, segmentation by region, customer type, or high-value audience.

You’ll get a clear, executive-ready report that includes:

• A CEP map showing where you lead, lag, and have white space opportunities
• Competitive benchmarks to see exactly where you stand
• Priority actions to grow mental availability

For a CEP pilot, we recommend 50-100 respondents, all of whom are category buyers, oftentimes defined as people who have purchased from the category within the past 6–12 months (depending on category). This ensures the results reflect real purchase behavior.

For ongoing tracking, 200 category buyers per cell is typical. Everyone answers about every brand, which keeps results consistent and maximizes comparability across the competitive set. In case you want to slice data across segments and behaviors, the number of respondents will increase.

Yes. Many clients fold CEP testing into their brand health, ad tracking, or brand asset studies. Unravel's complete Brain-Based Brand Tracker combines these solutions in a single brand tracker.

Alternatively, we can run it as a stand-alone study or plug directly into your existing brand tracker by integrating the survey and passing along the respondent ID.