Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the reasons, triggers or occasions that make a buyer consider purchasing within a category. For example, “treating myself after a long day” or “bringing something when visiting friends.”
They are not about your brand. They are about the buyer’s real-life situations: when and where they are, who they are with, what else they are doing, why they are buying, and how they want to feel.
For a while, CEPs were seen as the answer to almost everything in brand building. If you could just “own the right moments”, the thinking went, you would grow mental availability and win the category.
And there is evidence that this matters: the more relevant CEPs people associate with your brand, the easier you are to recall in buying situations, and the more often you are chosen.
Then reality caught up.
As more brands adopted CEP frameworks, a clear pattern began to emerge. Similar occasions. Similar structures. Similar briefs. And ultimately, brands that started to look and sound increasingly alike.
That does not mean CEPs are flawed. It means the way many organisations use them is too narrow.
When you reduce CEPs to generic occasions like “weekday dinner” or “on-the-go”, without connecting them to the role your brand plays or the feeling you want to create, you end up investing in the same memories as your competitors. Instead of driving distinctiveness, CEPs risk reinforcing sameness.
Meet Dora Harfman Bromée, turning insight into growth decisions
Dora Harfman Bromée has spent her career helping brands turn complex data into clear direction. At Nepa, her focus is on how mental availability, Category Entry Points and positioning work together in practice, not just in theory.
“CEPs started as a powerful idea,” she says. “But as they spread, they were simplified. And that simplification is where many brands lose value.”
The issue is rarely the concept itself. It is how far organisations are willing to take it.
“When CEPs become a list of generic occasions, you’re not really working with how memory works. You’re working with a surface-level description of behaviour, not the underlying drivers.”
“The backlash was overdue” from hype to hesitation
Q: CEPs were everywhere. Now we’re seeing more scepticism. Why?
“I’d say the backlash was overdue,” Dora says. “When a framework scales quickly, it almost always gets reduced.”
In many cases, CEPs have been implemented as little more than time-and-place labels:
Weekday dinner
Weekend treat
On-the-go
“That’s not incorrect. But it’s incomplete. You’re capturing when something happens, but not why it matters or how people want to feel in that moment.”
That gap is where the real issue begins.
“When multiple brands work with the same simplified CEP structures, they naturally end up targeting the same high-value occasions in similar ways. Over time, that creates convergence. The brands become harder to tell apart.”
Why CEPs still matter, if you go deeper
Q: Given that, why do you still advocate for CEPs?
“Because the core idea holds,” Dora says. “Mental availability is built by being easy to recall in buying situations.”
What needs to change is how CEPs are applied.
They need to be connected to positioning
“If CEPs sit separately from brand strategy, you end up optimising for presence, not meaning.”
They need to reflect the full context of a situation
“Time and place are only part of it. The need and the emotion are what shape behaviour and create distinctiveness.”
Brands need to be more selective
“If everyone focuses on the same set of ‘important’ occasions, you’re not creating advantage. You’re following the category.”
“Most brands measure too narrowly”
Q: What does that look like in practice?
“A narrow CEP framework is easy to activate, but difficult to use strategically,” Dora explains.
You can see where brands show up. But not why people choose them.
Take something like “weekday dinner”.
A need to reduce stress and simplify life
A moment of social connection and experimentation
“On a slide, those might be grouped together. But in reality, they’re completely different situations with different expectations of the brand.”
If those distinctions are not made, it becomes difficult to define what role the brand should play.
From occasions to context: what changes when you add depth
When CEPs are developed with context and emotion, they become more than descriptive labels.
They start to function as a framework for decision-making.
In practice, that means understanding:
What problem the consumer is trying to solve
Who else is involved
What else is happening at the same time
How the consumer wants to feel
Across categories, this shift leads to clearer priorities, more actionable opportunities and a more defined role for the brand.
From media input to growth roadmap
Q: How does that change the way CEPs are used?
“The biggest shift is that CEPs stop being just an input to media planning,” Dora says.
Instead, they become a way to structure growth decisions.
They help identify:
Where the brand already has strength
Where there is room to expand
Where gaps exist between perception and availability
“That opens up conversations beyond campaigns. It affects how you think about your offer, your distribution and your priorities as a business.”
How to avoid the sameness trap
Q: What should brands do differently?
Dora highlights a few practical steps.
Review how you articulate your CEPs in communication
“They should reflect real situations, but how you express them must be distinctive to your brand.”
Connect CEPs to positioning
“They should express the role you want your brand to play.”
Work with full context
“Include needs and emotions, not just occasions.”
Focus on the right moments
“You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be meaningful where it matters.”
Share across the organisation
“When more teams understand the same situations, CEPs become a shared growth framework.”
Final word: from backlash to better practice
Q: How would you summarise where CEPs are heading?
“The backlash has been useful,” Dora concludes. “It’s forced a more honest conversation about what CEPs are actually for.”
Used narrowly, they risk reinforcing category conventions.
Used properly, they help brands understand where they can be remembered, and why that memory matters.
That distinction is what separates visibility from growth.
Published on: 30TH APR 2026