Category entry points
Definition
The situations that send someone looking for a product like yours. Buyers enter a category through moments, like the audit that goes badly or the key hire who resigns, and they shortlist the brands those moments bring to mind.
How it works
The 95-5 rule, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, holds that in any given period roughly 95 per cent of a category’s buyers are out of market. Read that as the framework’s claim, since the split is an estimate; the argument would stand at 80-20. What follows: this quarter’s campaigns mostly meet people whose buying situation has not arrived yet. The work is to map the situations that start a purchase in your category, and to make creative that names them, so the brand is the one remembered when the trigger fires.
What to watch for
Open the ad account and read the creative as a stranger: if every ad names the product and none names a situation, the brand is only reachable by people already searching. Look at the audience split next: a budget spent wholly on retargeting and in-market segments is a bet that the 5 per cent is enough. Then ask whether anyone has written the entry points down; the first-call notes from recent won deals name them in the buyer’s own words. And be wary of judging this work on the quarter’s conversions, since the people it reaches are mostly not yet buying.
The question you ask
“Which buying situations do we want to be remembered for, and where are they written down?”