Day One Denial

I have an unpopular opinion. Most B2B brands are not suffering from poor ideas – though much can be done to improve the status quo, for sure. Nor are their sales funnels fundamentally bad. Nope, B2B brands – this collective powerhouse of the economy, the unseen backbone to our lives – has a more fundamental dilemma. 

They’re suffering from what I can only phrase as Day One Denial. 

“What!” you quite rightly splutter into your morning coffee. “You have another buzzphrase for me to learn?” 

What I mean is, we often forget that buyers – once we lift our heads from our CRM dashboards and think on the customer’s terms – are not, always, actually engaged in the act of… buying. Because we live and breathe marketing, we often kid ourselves that they are.

Heretical, I know, but this denial is spectacularly the case in B2B. 

Most of your future customers are not “in-market” today. A good 95% of them are, in fact, busy doing their jobs, dodging meetings, trying to look clever in front of the CFO and quietly ignoring a 37-slide sales deck. 

But one day – suddenly, urgently – they will be in-market. Ping! Maybe they’ll get a new boss. Maybe their old supplier messes up. Maybe their budget finally gets approved after a decade of passive-aggressive email threads. Whatever the spark, they go from having little to zero interest in your category, to being fully in the game. 

When they do, they’ll draw up what has become known colloquially around Marketingland as the Day One list – this is the list brands they already know and vaguely trust, and will almost certainly buy from when they’re ready to buy. These are the brands that come to mind. (And let us never forget, your brand is only ever a collection of thoughts and impressions inside your customer’s mind.) 

This also means that, if you’re not on that list, you’re not in the game.

To be fair this is not only for B2B. Think of the car industry, where most people, when having entered a car showroom, already know what type of car they want. Most people, almost all in B2B, having entered the supplier showroom, already know which supplier they want. 

Brand building, therefore, must precede intent. 

When it comes to marketing, you’re not marketing for today, you’re marketing for that day. The day they finally care. And when that moment comes, you don’t want to be the brand trying to shout your name from the car park or tapping on the windows waiting to be let into the building to close the sales conversation. You don’t want to be that guy on LinkedIn. You want to already be inside the building, nodding sagely, sipping their coffee, ready to slide over the contract.

What has any of this to do with the title of the article? Because the moment people enter the game, or rather the moment that people think about the category at all, is where Category Entry Points come in. 

Category Entry Points

What, you may rightly ask, are Category Entry Points (CEPs)? You’re not alone if you’ve never heard of them, but to me they’re one of the cleverest and under-appreciated tools in the marketing toolbox. 

Think of them as the mental portholes your brand can sail through. Not demographics. Not personas. Not funnel stages cooked up in a workshop with flapjacks and brownies, delicious though they are. They are real-world buying moments, driven by context, emotion and need. 

Unfashionable though it may seem in this age, I’m going to quote from an actual physical printed book – one of the marketing bibles in fact: How Brands Grow (Part 2) by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp. This is where Category Entry Points were really introduced to the world:

“Buyers use CEPs to retrieve brands. This makes them attractive associations for the brand. Smart use of advertising accelerates the brand’s links to CEP’s… The more links to CEPs a brand has, relative to competitors, the greater the chance is that it will be salient in any buying situation.”

Category Entry Points can work for any and every industry to provide a mental map of the category, but most importantly map many of the routes to that Day One List. 

They have their origins, as with many things in modern marketing science, with Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, notably the famous books How Brands Grow (Parts 1 and 2 as quoted here), where ideas of mental and physical availability, salience and distinctiveness, became more common parts of our marketing parlance. 

Put simply: Category Entry Points refer to the real-world situations or needs that trigger buyers to think of a product category. 

The goal is to make your brand come to mind when those moments strike. 

 

Why Category Entry Points Matter For B2B Brands

In B2B, Category Entry Points are more than just useful to know. They’re vital. Why? Because unlike in consumer markets, where someone might whimsically grab a chocolate bar, or switch shampoo on a whim, B2B buyers rarely buy anything spontaneously. Procurement doesn’t do whimsy. The stakes are often higher, because forgetting to buy a tin of beans may not land you in too much trouble – but when your software goes down? That’s serious. 

In B2B, people buy because something changes. A system goes kaput, a new regulation lands, a competitor gets ahead, the CEO wants to look innovative, a new leadership team is coming. These are contextual, high-stakes triggers – and they don’t happen often. But when they do, you need your brand to be first in mind, not first to bid.

But here’s the killer detail: the buying group is often large, political and risk-averse. No one wants to back the unknown brand scrambling around with a last minute sales pitch. They want the one they’ve seen in LinkedIn feeds, at trade shows, in magazines, or casually mentioned by others. The one that feels familiar. That’s mental availability at work – built through clear, repeated exposure to the right Category Entry Points.

Which means we’ve got work to do.

 

Trigger Happy

First, we go on the hunt for buying triggers. There are two ways we might go about this: the perfect way, and the perfectly decent way. The first way is to gather together in a room some of your category buyers, a good mix, and ply them with biscuits or whatever other incentives might be needed, then interview them.

A faster and more convenient way to do this is to find key figures in your company who engage with customers on a regular basis. This immediately transports us into the land of market orientation – as opposed to product orientation, or even sales orientation. We want to get in the mindset of your customers – their needs, their concerns. Them – not you. We’re not thinking about your company or your product at this stage. We’re not even thinking about touchpoints. We’re thinking about moments in your customers’ head, which requires gaining access to their minds in legal, non-surgical ways.

These minds hold precious information about what triggers a customer to think of the category. Not “what do we want to say on Linkedin” but rather, “what was happening when they first thought they needed a provider like us?”. 

Think: “Our competitor just got ISO certified”, “Our CFO asked what we’re spending on legacy software”, “A customer complained and threatened to leave.” We want an awful lot of these triggers and, being an agency, we want them preferably on Post-It notes and in bold colours. We want to identify rich, varied Category Entry Points, not just bland “need a new supplier” moments.

 

Map the Moments

What we’ll start to do is interrogate these across different contexts. Emotional. Situational. Time. Functional. Social. Physical. It could be any number of what’s going on, but generally finding four areas is a good idea to get going. Note we’re simply sketching out big ol’ lists for the moment, for we just need to extract as many of these as possible. 

  • Emotional could be: “I want to look smart in front of my boss.”
  • Situational might mean: “A compliance audit is due.”
  • Functional would be:  “We’ve outgrown our current system.”

You get the idea. The more of these we stack up, the more patterns and commonalities will begin to appear. But for now we want as many gateways into a category as possible. Fill a wall with Post-it notes. When we run these sessions, I’ve found that around four different contexts will start to bring forth a ton of great contributions – and once the first note or two gets pressed up on a wall or flipchart, people get it and the ideas start to flow.

 

Condense & Cluster

Once we’ve gathered the raw material – the dozens of moments, needs, triggers and quotes from your customer-facing teams – you need to bring some order to the chaos. 

At this stage, we stop gathering – and start grouping. We look for patterns or commonalities:

  • Are lots of them basically just variations on “regulatory panic”?
  • Are there emotional commonalities, like “fear of being left behind” or “pressure to look innovative”?
  • Are there trigger moments that tend to be focussed around a single individual – such as the CFO vs the CTO?
  • Are your competitors all over one in particular and is that worth dropping from consideration or should we be better than them?

This process isn’t just post-it note feng shui. It’s where strategy begins. We cluster the chaos into a manageable set of up to 6 key Category Entry Points that are both common enough to matter, but distinctive enough to own.

Because when that “Day One” moment comes, we don’t want to be vaguely relevant to 40 random things. We want to be famous for 5.

Strive To Be Remembered For These Moments

Voila! You have, say, 5 clusters of Category Entry Points. These are essentially 5 moments that your customers brush off the figurative biscuit crumbs from their mental Day One list and consult the names upon it. More than that, though, Category Entry Points are a shared language between sales and marketing. Sales hears these moments every day. Marketing needs to codify them.

So what does that mean in practicality? 

Now that we have your CEPs, you need to ensure your brand is linked to them in memory. What we want to do now is examine the idea: how will we make our brand come to mind in these moments?

  • What will be the key messages around those moments? What key headlines, if any, can you reach for so that you’re showing up when the customer thinks of the category – or do new messages need to be created? 
  • Which brand assets are good to go, or will those need creating and making relevant too?
  • Which channels are going to be relevant here in order to sneak your brand through (and yes, those B2B ones matter – LinkedIn, trade shows, etc)?

For the benefit of making things memorable, I now introduce how an outline of Category Entry Points might look for ThroneZone, the nation’s best and entirely made-up B2B portable toilet business.

Cluster 1. Last-Minute Panic 2. Reputation Management 3. Compliance Crunch 4. Volume Spike 5. VIP / Image Upgrade
People think about portable loos because… Supplier dropped out, logistics missed it, or weather changed plans last minute Complaints about smell, mess or cleanliness threaten reputation A site audit or safety check is looming and you’re short on units Workforce size or event attendance just scaled up massively A key guest, act or sponsor demands something posher than plastic boxes
Mood Panic, stress, fear of being blamed Embarrassment, disgust, rising anger Anxiety, risk aversion, fear of fines Overwhelm, urgency, fear of under-delivery Pressure to impress, desire to elevate experience
Messaging Inspiration “We’ve got your back. Even at 5am.”“Emergency loos, no drama.” “Keep your brand spotless.”“When clean matters most.” “HSE-ready, no shortcuts.”“Compliant from day one.” “Flush-tested for crowds.”“Loos that scale with you.” “Luxury where it counts.”“Because no one wants to queue in sequins.”
Comms Style Reassuring, calm-in-the-storm tone Clean, premium, slightly indignant Authority-led, calm confidence Practical, solution-focused, bulletproof Elegant, aspirational, image-enhancing
Ideal Channels Emergency response phone lines, SEO, local PPC Client service emails, case studies, PR Safety guides, trade press, construction forums Booking platforms, event partner networks, bulk order portals Sponsorship decks, hospitality packages, LinkedIn thought pieces

And by now your mind will have likely gone to strange places, or you may have marketing ideas fizzing away about how to put ThroneZone front and centre in those buying moments.  

 

Category Entry Point Informed Creative 

Once you’ve identified CEPs and they start to feel true, the real goal should be to create campaignable content that brings a little drama to those moments – and by doing so, absolutely thrusts your brand into your customer’s memory in a way that feels notably different.

It’s a chance not just simply to describe the moment, but rather embody it. Exaggerate it. Have fun with it. How can we make the feeling of a compliance panic or a new CEO – or VIP needs for portable loos – feel cinematic, funny and, more importantly, emotional? Because if you start to latch emotions around your brand to Category Entry Points, your brand becomes especially sticky in terms of salience. 

 

Summary

You can perhaps gather that I am a big fan of thinking in terms of Category Entry Points. 

I like them for many reasons. They get our heads transported from Businessland Central Office into a customer-grounded reality. They provide instant, actionable inspiration in the format of campaign thoughts, messaging directions, for any company, in any industry – something to take a crack at right away. 

But mostly, they give us a sense of that elusive Day One list and what a company needs to do, or rather the moments they need to own, in order to be on it. Suddenly abstract marketing ideas take on real, tangible substance for the long-term.