How Brands Really Grow…
“The key marketing task is to make a brand always easy to buy for every buyer; this requires mental and physical availability. Everything else is secondary.” — Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow
For all the talk about data, platforms, and AI, marketing at its core still comes down to a simple question: Do people think of you when it matters?
The answer lies in two of marketing science’s most powerful — yet often underused — concepts: Category Entry Points (CEPs) and Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs). Together, they form the foundation of mental availability — the ability of a brand to be easily recalled in a buying situation.
In my role at Publicis Groupe Denmark, I see my team leveraging this evidence-based approach to marketing across strategy, media, and creative on a daily basis. Our focus is to ensure that every campaign strengthens both short-term response and long-term brand memory through our Power of One approach.
🧠 Category Entry Points: How People Buy, Not How Marketers Think
Category Entry Points are the real-world situations, needs, or emotions that trigger purchase decisions. They’re not demographics or funnel stages — they’re the moments that open the door to your category.
Think “Friday night dinner,” “post-workout recovery,” or “quick breakfast before school.” Each represents a potential entry point for categories like ready meals, protein drinks, or cereals.
Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that brands grow by building memory structures linked to as many relevant Category Entry Points as possible. The more associations your brand holds in consumers’ minds — across different contexts — the higher the likelihood it’s recalled when a buying situation arises.
This is the true job of marketing: not to make people love your brand, but to make them think of it first when a relevant need appears.
🎨 Distinctive Brand Assets: Make the Link Instant
But being remembered isn’t enough. Once a buyer’s mind opens that category door, your brand must be recognized immediately.
That’s where Distinctive Brand Assets come in — the visual, verbal, and sonic cues that signal your brand without needing to show the logo. Colours, sounds, taglines, characters, typography — these are the shortcuts that trigger recognition and trust.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has consistently shown that most brands overestimate how distinctive their assets actually are. Many are either not famous enough (low recognition) or not unique enough (easily confused with competitors).
System1’s research reinforces this: emotionally engaging creative works best when it is fluent — when viewers instantly know who the message is from. Ads with strong brand fluency deliver higher recall, higher emotional response, and higher long-term ROI.
In other words: Distinctive Brand Assets turn attention into attribution. They make sure your marketing efforts — and your media spend — work for you, not your competitors. (More in this piece here).
💡 Where Media and Creative Intersect
Building mental availability isn’t the job of media or creative — it’s the job of both.
Media determines when and where people encounter your brand. Creative determines what they remember. One without the other doesn’t build the mental structures that drive growth.
From a media perspective, this means planning broad reach across multiple Category Entry Points — not just frequency against one narrow audience. Reach is fundamental to brand growth: the more category buyers you reach, the greater your chance of being recalled when a buying situation arises. Media strategy should ensure your brand is present in as many buying moments as possible, across time and context.
From a creative perspective, it means using and reinforcing your Distinctive Brand Assets consistently over time. Every impression should strengthen your brand’s mental availability — building familiarity, trust, and recognition long before purchase intent appears.
When CEPs, DBAs and reach work together, you get the compounding effect of both exposure and recognition: you’re there when people think about the category — and they instantly know it’s you.
📈 Why It Matters Now
Today’s media landscape is fragmented, attention is scarce, and the “path to purchase” is more chaotic than ever. That makes mental availability the most valuable real estate in marketing — and CEPs and DBAs the tools to secure it.
WARC’s Anatomy of Effectiveness (2022) highlights that brands combining emotional creative with consistent asset use outperform those that reinvent or fragment their identity. In a world of endless content, consistency isn’t boring — it’s efficient.
Meanwhile, Ehrenberg-Bass data shows that broad reach and memory-building — not micro-targeting — drive market share growth. The brands that win are those that show up in more buying situations, more often, and are recognised more easily when they do.
🧩 The Takeaway
To build brands that grow, focus less on targeting smaller and smaller groups, and more on building bigger mental availability and memory.
- Identify and prioritise your most relevant Category Entry Points — the real-world moments when your category is mentally accessed.
- Use and measure your Distinctive Brand Assets — ensure they’re both famous and unique.
- Plan media and creative to reinforce these associations consistently over time.
Or put simply:
Be remembered when it matters, and unmistakable when you are.
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: How Brands Grow (Byron Sharp)
- WARC: The Anatomy of Effectiveness 2022
- System1 Group: Test Your Ad & The Creative Effectiveness Framework
