100 years of doing it wrong — and how to do it right
Opinion
Since the creation of the sales funnel, marketers and agencies have focused on consideration. But how do we understand it and measure changes? Get your Byron Sharp off the shelf and find out.
The sales funnel celebrated its 100th birthday this year.
In the 1924 book Bond Salesmanship, the common three-part purchase funnel was first described with awareness at the top, consideration in the middle and conversion at the bottom.
It’s no surprise that consideration is a regular advertising KPI on many client briefs, given the strong relationship between consideration and usage (correlation of 0.79). Yet changes in consideration tend to be very small and slow-moving, making them hard to robustly quantify. This, in turn, makes it hard to understand what drives changes in consideration.
A global study by Millward Brown across 408 brands found the median year-on-year shift is only 0.01. And our industry regularly uses proxy metrics like “buzz” or brand perception metrics like “brand for me” in the hope that these are accurate predictors of changes in consideration.
But the answer to this enduring challenge has been hiding in plain sight.
Forgetting the fundamentals
Every agency and marketer worth their salt owns a copy of Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow — the most famous marketing text of the past 15 years.
Yet when I hosted a fireside chat with Sharp, he revealed something surprising. He had recently completed a keynote to a group of marketers and asked for a show of hands on who was aware of How Brands Grow; most hands went up. His follow-up question was who had read the book — in this case, only a handful stayed up.
I shouldn’t be too surprised. Massimo Giunco, former senior brand director at Nike, recently penned a searing takedown of the brand’s marketing strategy that went viral on LinkedIn. This followed Nike’s Q2 financial results, which saw the brand lose $25bn in market capitalisation in a day. Indeed, Nike’s shares hit their lowest point since 2018 — notably, with a decline of 32% since the beginning of 2024.
Giunco argued that Nike had ignored the central premise of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work: make brands easy to think of and easy to buy. Instead, it pursued a loyalty-focused, narrowly targeted, sales-based approach — one that saw the brand pull out of wholesales stores, expecting consumers to follow it to nike.com.
Even one of the most well-known brands in the world can forget the fundamentals.
Category entry points
I believe the most significant element of How Brands Grow is the importance of mental availability for brands — a concept that refers to the ease with which a brand comes to mind in buying situations. Specifically, category entry points (CEPs) — the cues or situations that trigger consumers to think of a brand within a specific category. These cues can be needs, occasions, places, times or other contextual factors that prompt a purchasing decision.
Their significance cannot be overstated; CEPs are directly linked to a brand’s growth prospects. If a brand doesn’t come to mind in a buying situation, it won’t be considered by consumers and therefore misses out on potential sales. And it’s not unproven — decades of research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has demonstrated the business case for pursuing this approach.
For example, in How Brands Grow, Sharp highlights how McDonald’s successfully built consideration for its coffee as a viable alternative to established high-street brands. Consumers’ perceptions of McDonald’s coffee were low, so the chain first made sure its coffee machines were on public view as a signifier of quality and that the smell of brewing coffee became part of the brand experience.
From here, McDonald’s invested in advertising to make links between visiting a restaurant at specific coffee-buying moments — for instance, on the way to work — to strengthen the associations with particular CEPs. The media strategy paid off and McDonald’s is now one of the leading coffee destinations.
While powerful brands might have a primary CEP, diversifying into multiple CEPs can lead to sustained growth over time. This approach is not confined to business-to-consumer marketing but is equally applicable in business-to-business contexts, where understanding and leveraging CEPs can yield significant competitive advantages.
Benefits of CEP planning
So, you get the theory. But how do you turn that into a sharp and effective marketing plan? How do you decide which CEPs have the most headroom that you’d target with finite budgets? How do you track success over time?
It requires careful and varied research before applying to strategy and I recommend reading both How Brands Grow part one and two, which contain some of the answers to those questions.
At Hearts & Science, we’ve taken the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute best practice and developed a multifaceted approach. This method not only builds on the theories, but also employs advanced data visualisation tools that allow us to radically alter our planning process.
We refer to this method as CEP planning — a reinvention of the 100-year funnel and something we have been using in our work with The National Lottery to great effect (see below). Instead, it fosters middle-out planning and fulfils the promise of communications planning by uniting everyone around a shared language and goal.
We believe there are five benefits to this approach:
>> Consideration: This slow-moving metric can be broken down into CEPs to design strategies for both short-term evaluation as well as acting as leading indicators on long-term consideration.
>> Competitive: By identifying strong and weak CEP linkages that audiences have with brands compared with the rest of their category, campaigns can be designed to build, reinforce or refresh a brand’s linkage to that CEP. That’s a step change versus previous approaches that uses share of voice at a channel or category level.
>> Context: Applying CEP thinking helps pinpoint key contexts and media moments so that we can win the ones that matter and enhance effectiveness.
>> Content: By identifying linkages to refresh, build or strengthen, working with ad agency and media partners to create clearer content briefs and stronger call-to-actions in marketing campaigns.
>> Consumer: CEPs make media plans more consumer-centric, understanding what moments trigger people to enter a category rather than simply focusing on a “reason to believe” or a demographic.
Set for life
Take The National Lottery’s Set for Life game as an example. Despite its appealing promise of a fixed monthly income of £10,000 a month for 30 years, it faced relatively low public awareness compared with other National Lottery games. However, our CEP research told us that potential players consider this game when daydreaming about future social plans and aspirations.
Our strategy, therefore, was to engage people by integrating the game into contexts relevant to their interests, such as food, travel, music and fashion. We employed automated contextual targeting across ITV and Sky to align with these passion points in real time, while our bespoke, intent-based audiences mapped to our CEPs enabled hyper-contextual communications across digital platforms.
This approach paid off — we exceeded engagement benchmarks by 266% and delivered a year-to-date sales increase of 4.2%.
Hopefully, delving deeply into an overlooked marketing theory might pave the way for revitalising other overlooked ideas. Our industry can sometimes become fixated with “the shiny new thing” (how’s your metaverse strategy going?), yet the answers are often simpler and hidden in plain sight.
A client’s point of view
With Ross Sergeant, global head of media, Allwyn
Do you feel the industry has neglected or overlooked some fundamentals of how marketing actually works?
“The business models of different marketing suppliers and agencies are not necessarily aligned with how marketing actually works. One gets a sense that, like a turkey voting for Christmas, if everyone followed what the science proves, a fair chunk would put themselves out of business.”
How useful has it been to identify CEPs for Allwyn and its game brands in its multiple markets?
“The work we have done across our markets in identifying and leveraging entry points for our category has refocused our media on the moments and occasions that really matter to grow our business.
“The approach has been significant in opening up category entry points, such as when people give gifts, which has now become part of society in markets like Austria and the Czech Republic.”
How does this approach compare with the way the industry previously worked? What challenges and rewards exist?
“Repeatedly, across every market, we see more value in leveraging a category entry point rather than, say, targeting a demographic or psychographic segment. It’s a challenge because most of us have been working in marketing for our whole careers believing that people fit into boxes and, within their boxes, behave in the same way.
“Similar to the way so many companies still embrace the world’s most famous personality test, which has been evaluated by thousands of professional psychologists and found to be inaccurate, arbitrary and to have as much scientific validity as one’s astrological sign, marketers and advertising professionals still refer to potential buyers in demographic or psychographic terms. It’s progressing, but slowly.”
Do you see potential in turning other theories into strategic action?
“Yes indeed, although I would say we have potential in turning other laws, proven by objective, independent science, into action. I believe we should invest in funding academic study so that we can apply that science in doing our trade. Marketing is, after all, a social science.
“One major piece of science we can all benefit from turning into action is the law of double jeopardy. It doesn’t just take a swipe at loyalty programmes but needs a rethink of the terms ‘acquisition’ and ‘retention’ as marketing concepts.”
Simon Carr is chief strategy officer at Hearts & Science