Winning the Moments That Matter: Bridging Brand and Performance Media Through Category Entry Points

For years, we’ve talked about bringing brand and performance closer together. We’ve built full-funnel strategies, shared measurement frameworks and debates about where brand ends and performance begins. Yet, in practice, the two often still operate as separate worlds: different teams, budgets, KPIs and definitions of success. Ultimately our job is to help our clients to be more buyable, which we do by removing silos and thinking holistically in order to improve both mental and physical availability.

Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the building blocks of mental availability and also give us a much simpler way to connect brand and performance media, forming the central structure of our planning process. Rather than starting with the funnel or the channel, CEPs start with the moment - the situation, need or occasion that causes someone to think about entering a category. For a make-up brand, this could be “my every-day product has run out, and I need it for work tomorrow” or “I’ve got a few events coming up this summer, I’d like some higher end products to make me feel my best”. The way a brand shows up for these moments needs to differ, but each of these moments should be considered all the way across the funnel.

A brand campaign can build associations with the moment long before someone is ready to buy. Search or LLM (Large Language Model) campaigns, like on ChatGPT, can capture demand when intent emerges. Retail media can influence the final choice. Dynamic creative can make the message relevant to the specific situation. All of this however can link back to one trigger moment.

Too many agencies start planning by asking "Which channels should we use?" They may be reliant on AI and algorithms to make channel choices for them but to truly help brands win we should first ask "What are the moments that matter for our audience? How do we want our brand to show up in them?" and "Which do we want to prioritise?". The channels then become the activation of the strategy, rather than the strategy itself.

This also gives us a more meaningful measurement opportunity. We have become very good at measuring individual channels; the reach of a TV campaign and the immediate sales this has driven, the CTR% of a paid social ad, the CPA of a search campaign or the ROAS of retail media. If we can identify the moments that matter that deliver the greatest commercial impact, we can start measuring whether our activity is making the brand more likely to come to mind in those moments in our brand tracking with specific statements that demonstrate brand linkage to category entry points. Ultimately the ambition is to then connect that linkage shift to business impact through MMM (Media Mix Modelling) measurement – connecting mental availability to physical action.

This is where working with a truly integrated agency has a real advantage. The way we work at IMA brings together all disciplines, looking at CEP’s holistically rather than operating in silos across multiple specialist teams. We develop a single strategy to win the moments that matter and create a connected plan to link creative and paid, owned and earned media that is deployed at the right time in the right place with the right message for the moment. Whilst this will strengthen mental availability, we must also ensure the brand is maximising physical availability. A poor retail experience can result in a loss of up to 7% of sales, even when consumers enter with an intention to purchase. Those sales are likely to shift to competitors, meaning the impact is twofold: lost revenue and wasted marketing investment that successfully created demand but failed to convert it.