Did you know that most of what we do and decide is controlled by our feelings, not our thoughts?

People are very strange. We often say we can think very clearly, but most of the time, our feelings make our choices.

So, how can businesses make people buy from them instead of their rivals?

If we know that people don’t think very clearly, then trying to appeal to their brains won’t help much.

Sometimes, we do need to use clear thinking. But that’s like a tiny spot on a big face.

Since people usually follow their feelings, not their thoughts, our job as marketers is to make people remember our brand before they start thinking about buying.

This is where Category Entry Points (CEPs) come in.

What are CEPs

Imagine you’re selling chips or a business finance service. Your main job is to make people remember your brand. This is important when people want to buy. The stronger your memory links, the more likely they’ll choose you.

Don’t worry about being different. Many companies think they need to be unique to be successful. But this isn’t always true. Research shows that successful brands usually appeal to everyone in the market, not just a specific group.

This doesn’t mean that being different isn’t important. But instead of trying to find something special about your company, you should focus on key moments when people think about buying your product or service. These moments can help people connect your brand with their memories.

Finding Your CEPs

Choosing the right places to promote your brand is not easy. But there are ways to think about it without spending money on research.

The 7 Ws is a tool that helps you do this:

1. When: When do people think about your product? (Does it depend on the season?)
2. Where: Where do people usually use your product? (Where do your customers work?)
3. While: What happens before, after, or during people’s use of your product? (What do people do after they use it?)
4. What: What other products do people use with your product? (How does your product work with other things?)
5. Why: Why do people buy your product? (What makes people want to buy it?)
6. How: How do people feel when they use your product? (How did you feel before you used it?)
7. Whom: Who uses your product? (Who is affected by your product?)

Think about what makes your business special. Write down how these things help your customers. Then, think about these questions:

• Who are your customers?
• What do they need?
• When do they need it?
• Where do they look for it?
• Why do they choose you?
• How do they use your product or service?

Find at least 10 answers. Choose the best 5-7 answers that are most important to your business. These answers will help you decide how to market your business.

The more you showcase these aspects in your ads and materials, the more people will remember your business. This increases the chance they’ll think of you when they need what you offer.

CEPs In Action

Let’s say you’re a business that helps companies with money.

You can help them in many ways, like:

• Growing: If they want to get bigger in the United States.
• Saving Money: If they want to pay less for money.
• Getting More Money: If they want to have the right mix of money.
• Buying Other Companies: If they want to buy another company.
• Making New Things: If they want to make something new.
• Passing the Company to Family: If a family wants to give the company to their children.
• And many other things.

When a company wants to grow bigger in the United States and needs money to do so.

Here’s what I would do:

• Host a big meeting for international banks in my area. I’d get a famous speaker to talk.
• Tell a story about a small business that started in Alberta and opened a store in Texas. I’d make it a touching story.
• Make it easy to find loans or investments for US growth on my website.
• Write articles about my knowledge and share them on my website and social media.
• Use the right words for Google Search, so my company shows up first.
• Talk to people who host podcasts about money.

Remember, focus on one main idea at a time. People can’t handle too many ideas at once. So, the less you try to squeeze in, the better your marketing will be.

Marketing Is An Investment

Even with a big advertising budget, results won’t come immediately. Building brand connections takes time. Consistent efforts can boost profits, make your business less sensitive to price changes, and increase market share.

While your sales team is working to get customers now, your job as a marketer is to help the business make money in the long run.

Professor John Dawes explained this well in his paper called “The 95–5 Rule.” He said that advertising works by building and refreshing memories of your brand. These memories help when customers are ready to buy. So, if your advertising is better at building these memories, your brand will be more competitive.

You Are Not The Customer

Next time you catch your marketing team using their own experiences to predict how their customers might behave… stop them right there.

Developing a brand that they love and utilize is the aim of any marketer.

It is comparable to your first experience sitting in a car’s driver’s seat. You can control where it goes.

As marketers, we grow up watching commercials, go to business school to learn about the most popular brands, and usually begin our careers with smaller, lesser-known brands.

But eventually, we may be trusted to lead a well-known brand — like Ruffles, Pepsi, Nike, the NBA, or McDonald’s. Just think of the amazing opportunities we’ll have every day!

We’ll get to plan the brand’s future innovations, team up with creative agencies to discover new insights for major campaigns, connect with our most loyal customers, and partner with other top brands that share a similar customer base.

This is the dream!

While there’s a chance you’ll be in this position someday, the whole idea is flawed from the start.

Let me explain.

Marketers Are Weird Creatures

If you work in marketing, you understand this — we’re different from others in the business world.

Marketing teams are often seen as the outgoing, lively, and culturally aware group. Part of our role is to generate excitement around the company’s brands.

We’re all about brands — we pay attention to TV commercials, avoid skipping ads on YouTube, explore new products, follow brands on social media, read books about them, watch the Super Bowl just for the ads, disable ad blockers, notice every billboard on our way to work, and so much more.

For us, this is just how we live. However, consider it from a different angle.

How many everyday consumers, even slightly, think about brands like we do?

The short answer: almost none.

We Are Not The Customer

This basic yet powerful insight is the beginning of any successful journey in marketing.

When you first get a job as a marketer and sign that contract, you’re stepping into a different world.

You move away from seeing things as a consumer, and you’ll never look at your product the same way again.

This is a very important idea in marketing. You begin to see things differently from your consumers when you work for a corporation.

Mark Ritson said something famous, “You can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle.”

This idea shows that marketers often feel like they don’t know enough about their customers. This gap will eventually be filled with knowledge from research, but at the beginning, it’s a reality check: you don’t truly understand who buys your product. It would be best if you accepted this.

This experience, often called market orientation (or, in simpler terms, being customer-focused or obsessed with the consumer), is an eye-opener.

It’s a way of thinking that builds the foundation for all the meaningful work you’ll do as a marketer. It encourages you to question your instincts and think more like a marketer, verifying your beliefs and discovering insights through thorough research.

Read More: How To Develop A Winning Customer Experience Strategy?

Consumer Centricity

When I worked at PepsiCo (a company deeply focused on customers and aware of common marketing mistakes), we would conduct one-on-one interviews with random people across Canada. We’d spend an hour talking with strangers and asking questions about our product category.

These chats were incredibly enlightening. We found that: 1) most people don’t view your brand as directly competing with other similar brands—they see them as alternative options, not rivals; 2) they usually don’t realize that the same company owns several brands they use; and 3) they might only buy your product once or twice a year.

Let’s dive into this:

People don’t always logically buy things. For example, when they’re thirsty, they might think, “Should I get a Coke or a Gatorade?”. This is like how people who buy Pepsi might also buy Coke, but it’s not as easy to see.

When a shopper walks down the chip aisle at the store, they don’t see all the effort marketers put into arranging Frito-Lay products perfectly on the shelf. Instead, they see a bunch of items they don’t often think about, ignore most of them, and head straight to their usual choice: Doritos.

Lastly, buying habits are very uneven. For some products, the average consumer might buy something three times a year, but in reality, most people only buy it once a year, while a few frequent buyers might purchase it ten times a year. As Professor Byron Sharp discovered, the 80/20 rule in marketing is more accurately represented as a 60/20 ratio, indicating that a significant portion of a brand’s sales originate from a relatively small subset of its customer base.

Furthermore, individuals are inundated with hundreds of advertisements daily, with the vast majority passing unnoticed. If one were to devote attention to every advertisement encountered, it would consume over three hours per day, highlighting the selective nature of human perception.

Human attention is inherently selective, with many daily activities, such as brushing teeth or preparing coffee, performed on autopilot. The cognitive limitations of the human brain prevent the simultaneous processing of excessive information, leading to a decline in attention and reliance on subconscious mechanisms to manage routine tasks.

Market Orientation

Put otherwise, the majority of individuals don’t care about your brand.

As marketers, we compete with one or two other people every two days for three to six seconds of their time.  And rarely do we accomplish that.

But we shouldn’t feel discouraged by it. This is a gift. One that keeps reminding us that we aren’t doing heart surgery for a living.

Instead of trying to be forgotten, we want people to remember our brand when they’re thinking about buying things like ours.

But if we only listen to the people who sell things, we’ll probably make mistakes all the time.

Consumers don’t think like us.

So, next time you hear your marketing team using their own experiences as a proxy for how their consumers would behave… stop them right there.

We are NOT the customer.