Category entry points.

§I What we re-tested and why.

Category entry points, as framed in the Romaniuk and Sharp work, are the set of situational cues a shopper uses to retrieve a brand from memory at the moment of need. The framework has been influential for a decade inside larger CPG shops. It has been treated, inside smaller consumer brands, mostly as Ehrenberg-Bass orthodoxy and therefore either ignored or adopted uncritically. Neither response is useful.

In the second half of 2025 we re-ran the CEP framework against a twelve-brand cohort from our own client base. We used the published methodology, with one adaptation. We added a third dimension to the W-questions: not only where, when, and with-whom, but also with-what-role — a role the category plays in the moment, separable from situation. This is a departure from the textbook.

The result: the first two-thirds of the framework held, sharply. The remaining third did not hold in ways that are commercially interesting for smaller brands. What follows is the annotated result.

§II What held.

The core finding holds. Shoppers retrieve brands using situational cues, not category features; a brand's retrieval share is strongly correlated with the number of CEPs it is linked to in memory; and that correlation is more predictive of share than most of the perceptual measures that dominate brand tracking decks.

Across our twelve brands, the CEP count explained 0.71 of the variance in unaided attribution in category. Retail velocity correlated with CEP count at 0.63. These are strong signals, consistent with the published Ehrenberg-Bass findings. Smaller-brand founders who dismiss the framework as ‘for P&G’ are making a mistake. The physics is the same at every brand size; the budgets are different.

The second thing that held: the number of CEPs a brand can usefully own, even at larger scale, is smaller than the published literature suggests. Our cohort plateaued, in terms of return per additional CEP, at around seven. Above seven, additional CEPs were linked weakly and under-contributed. The textbook implies a longer tail; our data did not.

§III What did not hold.

The part of the framework that did not hold for our cohort is the assumption that all CEPs are worth linking. In our data, the return per CEP varied by a factor of roughly 3.6 between the best-returning CEP and the median CEP. Low-return CEPs did not merely contribute less; they cannibalised attention from the high-return ones by diluting the brand's expressed situational argument. This is not in the published work.

The implication for smaller brands is significant. Building breadth of CEP association, as the textbook recommends, is a strategy for a brand with the budget to saturate the shopper with a coherent story across ten or fifteen situational linkages. A smaller brand cannot do this. It can afford three to five linkages. The discipline becomes choosing the right three-to-five, not multiplying linkages.

We found, consistently in our cohort, that the right three-to-five were those with the highest occasion-density — occasions occurring to the shopper most frequently, in the most consistent emotional register. A low-density CEP, even if it was retrievable, did not convert at the shelf. A high-density CEP, even if it was less mentally available, converted disproportionately.

For smaller consumer brands, the discipline is not to build as many category entry points as possible. It is to own five of them harder than anyone else. — Ada Chen, research practice note

§IV The role adjustment.

The adaptation we made — adding role as a dimension to the W-questions — produced the single most commercially useful finding of the study. Once we coded CEPs not only by situation but by the role the category plays inside that situation, the low-return CEPs clustered around roles that the brand was not in fact fulfilling. Roles are the missing coordinate.

For example: a beauty brand we tested was retrieving well for a situation (morning, in front of a mirror, alone) but poorly for the role of a ritual inside that situation. The brand had built the situation association and skipped the role association. Correcting the role association, through a pack copy change and a campaign line, lifted unaided attribution by nine points inside two quarters, without any lift in the underlying situation-CEP count.

Our interpretation is that situational CEPs are necessary but not sufficient. The shopper retrieves brands through situations, but converts on the basis of roles inside those situations. The textbook CEP framework captures the first; the field requires the second.

§V Three rules we now use.

First: identify the three-to-five highest-density situational CEPs in your category and build coherently against them; ignore the long tail. Second: code each CEP not only by situation but by the role your brand plays in that moment, and verify the role is defensible against competitors. Third: audit every six months. CEPs decay if the brand stops reinforcing them; roles drift if the brand stops enacting them.

Nothing about this undermines the underlying Ehrenberg-Bass argument. It adapts it to the capital constraints of a consumer brand at Series A to Series C scale, and it adds a dimension that we believe the published framework implicitly assumes but does not name. Whether role-coded CEPs make it into the textbook is not our concern. Whether our clients convert more of their shelf attention into retrievable category positions is, and this framing does it.