Defining CEPs and Mental Availability
Category Entry Points (CEPs) and Mental Availability analysis are both based on the work of Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science (author of Better Brand Health and co-author of How Brands Grow).
In Quantilope’s “Better Brand Health Tracking Series,” it defines Category Entry Points (CEPs) as “cues” that guide a consumer to a certain buying scenario. For example, packing for a summer vacation might be a CEP cue to go out and buy sunscreen or travel-sized items. CEPs, then, help you understand the contexts in which consumers are likely to be thinking about your product category. Knowing this allows you to cater your marketing messaging and other branding efforts to those specific scenarios.
In addition, Mental Availability analysis lets brands know when consumers are thinking about their specific brand in buying scenarios (aka, when they find themselves in Category Entry Points). So, when a consumer is packing for a summer trip and thinking about buying sunscreen and travel items, they go to the store knowing they want to look for Banana Boat sunscreen or a travel-sized Dove body wash. That indicates strong Mental Availability for those brands.
Mental Availability can be broken down further. According to Quantilope’s “Better Brand Health Tracking Series: Benefits of Mental Availability,” Mental Availability brings a fresh perspective to brand health tracking. “While traditional ways of brand health tracking are solid and justifiable, brands are missing out on a whole new layer of insights that could generate an even greater impact within their organization. That’s because Mental Availability analysis produces four key metrics that traditional brand tracking does not,” asserts Quantilope.
Quantilope breaks down those metrics of mental availability as follows:
- Mental Market Share (MMS): How ‘present’ a brand is in consumers’ minds. If the MMS is higher than the actual sales share, the brand might need to fix physical availability.
- Mental Penetration (MPen): How many consumers have at least some mental availability of a brand. If MPen is low for non-buyers, there is large growth potential for brands.
- Network Size (NS): How broad/varied category associations are for each brand. If NS is higher than MPen, brands are struggling to reach new buyers and instead are broadening existing networks.
- Share of Mind (SoM): What other brands are customers thinking of in addition to a specific brand? If a competitor is “stealing” SoM from a brand’s consumers, this weakens the link between Mental Availability and actual sales.
Tracking the Brand Experience
All Things Insights examined brand loyalty in “Using Insights to Win Customer Loyalty.” Are your customers staying put, or is your company struggling with retention? Leveraging market research and gaining actionable insights could be the key to building better consumer loyalty initiatives. Sales alone might gain revenue for the company, but the objective should also be about creating customer relationships, developing brand awareness, and to keep customers coming back for repeat sales.
Looking forward to TMRE 2024? The conference, which will be held October 8 to 10, will feature the session, “Tracking Mental Availability & Advantages with Organic Valley,” presented by Quantilope’s CEO & Co-Founder, Dr. Peter Aschmoneit, and Organic Valley’s Senior Director of Consumer Strategy, Tripp Hughes. The session will introduce a new approach to dynamic brand health tracking based on recent work from Professor Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. This new approach focuses on category entry points, mental availability, and mental advantages. It will highlight how to drive action from your brand health tracker and showcase learnings from Organic Valley’s early adoption of this innovative new approach to tracking. Register for TMRE 2024 here.
Focusing on Brand Health
Mental availability is a crucial component of brand health tracking. It measures a brand’s ability to come to mind spontaneously in relevant purchase situations. Here’s why it’s important, according to Gemini:
- Predicts Purchase Behavior: Brands with high mental availability are more likely to be considered and chosen by consumers. It’s a leading indicator of sales performance.
- Identifies Growth Opportunities: By understanding which situations trigger brand recall, businesses can identify gaps in their marketing efforts and target specific consumer moments.
- Measures Brand Salience: Mental availability gauges a brand’s prominence in the consumer’s mind, helping to understand its competitive position.
- Informs Marketing Strategy: By tracking mental availability over time, brands can measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and make data-driven adjustments.
Essentially, mental availability reflects how deeply ingrained a brand is in consumers’ minds. It’s a powerful metric for understanding brand health and driving future growth.
Gaining a Mental Advantage
The brand awareness tools that have been used over the last few decades are effective yet can potentially be improved upon with such new aspects as mental availability. With fierce competition and a lot of clutter in the marketplace, assessing the many facets of brand health, along with factors such as brand perception, reputation, attributes and positioning, has never been more important.
Mental availability, perhaps, gives an extra edge to benchmarking against the competition while understanding how your brand performs with your target audience. The customer journey experience and the employee experience are also keys to a brand’s health. There are many aspects to brand health and perhaps a combination of both traditional and newer methods can help complete the fuller picture. Gaining a mental availability advantage can show the marketer just what directions to pursue when reinforcing a brand for a long and successful, healthy future.
Video courtesy of Let’s Talk Branding
