You're probably thinking about your market the wrong way.
- Diego Chicharro
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
There's a version of marketing strategy that feels very sensible.
You define your category. You map your competitors. You find out which occasions people already associate with brands like yours. Then you work out where there's a gap, and you go after it.
Neat. Logical. Evidence-based.
Also, for most challenger brands, quietly useless.
Not because the theory is wrong. The theory - Category Entry Points, or CEPs, pioneered by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute - is one of the most useful frameworks in modern marketing. Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Binet and Field, Ritson. The evidence base is serious, and the conclusion is clear: brands grow when they're mentally available in more buying situations, for more people. Be there when it counts. Be linked to more moments. Get chosen more often.
That's real. That's well proven. And that's not the problem.
The problem is where most brands look for those moments.
The map that shows you the wrong territory
Traditional CEP research works like this. You study the occasions when people think about buying your type of product. You map which brands come to mind. You find the gaps - the moments nobody's claimed yet, and you plant your flag there.
Sensible. But there's a structural flaw buried in step one.
You're researching the category as it already exists.
Which means you're finding CEPs that are already contested. Territory your competitors have already carved up, or are at least looking at. At best, you're finding the leftovers. At worst, you're fighting for scraps in someone else's backyard while the genuinely unclaimed territory sits one category over, completely ignored.
"Categories are, of course, complete bollocks… Roger does not walk out of his office looking for instant noodles. He races out with 10 minutes to get something he can eat fast. Chocolate bars compete with noodles, which compete with muesli bars and kebabs… Competition is not up to marketers. It's decided by the consumer." - Mark Ritson
The consumer doesn't care about your shelf. They care about their problem. And the brands that grow fastest are usually the ones that figured out what problem they're actually solving, not the one they assumed they were solving.
The question most brands never ask
Before you map any CEPs, there's a prior question. A bigger one.
What is the actual category this brand competes in - in people's heads, not on a product shelf?
Not your trade category. Not how a buyer would file you. But what a consumer is actually deciding between in the moment they're most likely to reach for you.
Buxton Water sits in the bottled water aisle. But for a busy professional grabbing something in a travel outlet at 8am, Buxton isn't competing with Evian. It's competing with coffee, Diet Coke, Red Bull, and a KitKat. The real choice isn't "which water?" It's "what do I grab to get through the next three hours?"
That's a completely different category. With completely different competitors. And completely different CEPs.
The moment you ask the question properly, the map changes.
Why this matters more for challengers
If you have a big budget, this is less urgent. You can buy your way into multiple CEPs across multiple occasions. You can spread awareness broadly enough that the inefficiencies average out.
If you don't (and most scale-ups don't ), focus is everything.
Ehrenberg-Bass is clear on this: a brand linked to fifteen CEPs will be chosen more often than one linked to three. Breadth of coverage drives retrieval. More retrieval, more purchase.
But building that breadth requires something the theory is less clear about: how do CEP associations get built in the first place?
The answer, from Binet and Field and the IPA effectiveness database, is consistent and a little inconvenient. Long-term memory structures aren't built by rational messages. Not by product facts. Not by price promotions. Not by performance media. They're built by emotion. By ideas distinctive enough, and felt deeply enough, to stick.
Which creates a genuine tension.
At the bottom of the funnel, breadth wins. At the top of the funnel (where memory structures are actually built), breadth is the enemy of depth. You cannot build strong emotional associations around fifteen ideas simultaneously. You can't be famous for everything. No brand is.
The brands with the deepest CEP associations chose one territory and committed to it. Not because other CEPs didn't matter, but because fame requires focus.
Kit Kat has owned one CEP since 1957. The permission to stop. Have a break. A feeling so simply expressed, so consistently reinforced, that it's survived nearly seventy years of changing media, changing culture, and changing consumers. Not a product feature. Not a USP. A feeling that is now inseparable from the brand.
That's what a real CEP platform looks like. One idea. Long time. Consistent expression.
What this means for you
If you're a scale-up founder or CEO reading this, the question isn't "which CEPs do we want to own?"
It's: Are we even looking in the right place?
Because the most powerful entry points are usually not in your direct competitive set at all. They're in the negative experiences people have with substitutes. In adjacent categories nobody in your space has thought to look at. In moments where people are quietly suffering with the alternative, and no incumbent has any incentive to fix it.
That's where challenger brands break through. Not by competing harder in the existing map. By redrawing it.
In the next post: why your biggest competitor probably isn't who you think it is, and what P&O Ferries found when they stopped looking at Eurostar.
At OSER, this is the kind of work we do with scale-up brands who've hit a growth ceiling. If that sounds familiar, let's talk.
About Diego Chicharro: Diego is Partner & Growth Strategy at OSER. 17 years in brand strategy and effectiveness, most recently Head of Effectiveness at Publicis London, with IPA, Effies, and Marketing Week-recognised work across P&O Ferries, Buxton Water, and Heineken. He brings big-agency thinking to scale-up problems.
