We finally found a strategy to connect brand and performance

Opinion

CEPs give brand and performance teams the same commercial target, measurement framework, and moment to act. They are the first credible bridge between the two disciplines, says Simon Carr and Laura Smith-Collins.

For all the sophistication the industry has built in both brand and performance marketing, the two still operate on different planets. Separate P&Ls, separate tools, separate conversations with the client. There’s rarely even a shared business objective between them, but it shouldn’t have to be quite so binary.

True, we’ve made progress in how we discuss the concept of a shared measurement framework over years of debate, but not nearly enough in actually fixing the structure. The result is typically a planning system that can optimise brilliantly within each silo but struggles to create growth across them.

Category Entry Points (CEP) change that

A CEP is the cue or situation that triggers a consumer to think of a brand within a specific category – “I want to order a takeaway that will arrive fast, but isn’t pizza again,” or “I need a gift I can order today and not look like I forgot.”

For a real-world example, consider Euromillions and the moment “when I’m daydreaming about the future.” That single moment can be a contextual targeting segment built on browsing behaviour (performance). It can also be a linear TV placement aligned with a particular programming category (brand). It’s one moment, but there are several ways to engage it throughout the funnel. CEPs beat awareness and recall.

That’s what CEP thinking across brand and performance looks like in practice, and it’s why CEPs give brand and performance teams the same commercial target, measurement framework, and moment to act. They are the first credible bridge between the two disciplines.

A shared commercial moment

So why are marketers not dancing in the streets? Because organisational structures tend to stop it from happening.

When a CMO controls the entire budget, there tends to be genuine conversation about how they work together. But when brand sits in marketing and performance sits in e-commerce, two different teams turn up with two different definitions of success.

The numbers confirm this: a poll we ran ahead of Cannes Lions asked CMOs what holds back a unified planning framework using CEPs; 61% of senior marketers blamed internal structure and process.

But structure isn’t the only reason; we also have to dismantle how these different camps misuse well-established marketing theory.

Byron Sharp’s concepts of mental and physical availability – a fundamental Ehrenberg-Bass worldview- are often used to justify the brand and performance silos. Brand teams claim mental availability as exclusively theirs; performance teams claim physical, or as it’s increasingly known, purchase availability.

But Sharp never intended them as a binary. Mental availability ensures your brand comes to mind when a buying cue occurs; physical/purchase availability ensures the consumer can actually complete the transaction. But they are no longer separate worlds, and CEPs reveal them as a continuous loop – with the commercial power sitting in the overlap.

CEPs beat awareness and recall

This structural divide also persists because we are still measuring the wrong things. CEPs are far more useful than traditional awareness metrics because they measure brand linkage at very specific entry points.

Awareness simply tells you that a consumer knows you exist. It doesn’t tell you whether your brand surfaces in the exact moment that matters – when someone is standing at a bar, scrolling an app, or asking an AI assistant for anniversary gift ideas.

CEP measurement asks a far more precise commercial question: in the situations that actually trigger a purchase, does your brand come to mind? That is a metric you can actually build a brief around for both brand and performance.

Applying performance thinking further up the funnel

A CEP-led approach also lets us apply performance thinking much further up the funnel.

Brands still need mass reach — that hasn’t changed. The change is that, instead of ‘reach’ for its own sake, it’s ‘reach’ deliberately built across the full breadth of CEPs (or those that have been identified and prioritised), so the brand comes to mind in as many buying situations as possible. Those CEPs can be mapped across the entire funnel and activated through multiple routes.

Furthermore, CEPs provide a measurable way to demonstrate both long- and short-term impacts. By tracking changes in CEP linkage alongside performance metrics, we can connect the two.

Brand awareness and consideration take a long time to shift. CEPs give a live read on how people are thinking about a brand in the specific buying moments that matter, and critically, we can see that translate into conversions – something it’s been difficult to demonstrate from awareness and consideration alone.

Planning across the journey

Once that link is visible, the natural next step is building a plan around it. CEPs give marketers a practical way to do that, structured across three layers that stack into a full activation plan:

Context is the environment – recipe content for weekend meal planning, for example.

Situation is the intent – signals suggesting someone is actively planning that meal.

Proximity is the closeness to action – the moment the consumer is nearest to the CEP.

One reason marketers should try this strategy is that technology is making each layer more potent.

For instance, retail-driven AI lets marketers target category moments with greater precision, drawing on vast volumes of shopper data.

Generative engine optimisation matters because generative prompts are longer and more situational, much closer to a CEP than a traditional search query. Meanwhile, dynamic creative optimisation means CEP thinking can directly inform creative work, generating content tied to the specific moment and signal that triggered it.

But what really makes these tools valuable is that they all operate under the same principle: brand and performance working from an identical map of moments, rather than two teams optimising separately and hoping their numbers eventually meet in the middle.

So next time a brief lands, ensure it’s a Category Entry Point that defines the shared objective. It is the single most effective way to turn years of structural debate into actual collaboration.

Simon Carr is chief strategy officer at Hearts & Science. Laura Smith-Collins is the chief digital and data officer at Hearts & Science.